In Effigy
by kerricarri
Summary: Rachel's life is ruled by loss and she can't dredge up the energy to care. As an apathetic journalist, though, she's wholly unprepared for the ramifications of tracking down the Titans' killers or the surprising identity of her neighbor, Wally West.
1. Fatherly Teachings

I wanted to take a stab at how people often start off together but drift to their separate ways. The idea of Raven being ruled by nostalgia and loss was something I wanted to portray. She's in character except for having no powers as Trigon is wholly human here. Other things remain the same, though, like the existence of the Teen Titans.

* * *

We were all very young and innocent once. You know…that time when we still hid behind Mommy's skirt and held Daddy's hand because you were far too terribly shy to meet the new neighbors?

For me, it went something like that. When I met him. Slim faced, grubby, black-haired little boy he was, he wasn't my neighbor, per se. I wouldn't be able to tell you how in the world we became friends, but—

I remember the day he left. It stung then. It still stings now. I remember when I finally got a phone call from them, the people he had moved away with to live with some relatives in another city east to mine. That coast seemed so faraway. I cried when I heard that. Now, it seems so silly, so childish, but I was just a little girl then. A little girl who knew she would be lonely very, very soon.

I remember waiting with baited breath, waiting desperately for that call…but it never came. And just when I had begun to realize that call would never come it did come. Only, it came for her, my mother.

And as I listened from behind closed doors to my mother speaking to his mother, with laughing tones, I kept wondering and wondering and wondering…

"When would he call me back?"

Or, "When will he miss me?"

But he never did. He never…ever did.

That phone call was the last.

xx

Because our bodies were small and weak, we preferred going to the library rather than the school grounds. This made us become naturally close, even when we were bullied by our classmates. But...somehow I didn't feel scared because of my feelings for him. Feelings I never had a word for, but were still _there_.

In the future, we would attend the same junior high school and always be together. Somehow, I felt just like that.

Obviously, it never happened. He moved to Gotham and I transferred to Jump. We were both unhappy, I was sure, so I would sit by the phone and wait for him, certain with childish confidence that he would call. We'd never exchanged addresses, the move was so sudden. We were too naïve to have thought of such an idea, anyway, but I knew, instinctively, that if the phone was taken away, he would be taken away as well. He wasn't gone. He was still there, waiting for me...but where? I didn't know how to reach him. Gotham seemed very far away...

Eventually, my father got sick of my pining and tore the phone out of the wall. The sad, torn, corded phone had been left there to collect dust, and he never paid the bills after that. I canceled our service. I felt helpless. I remember how I sat, limp, on the kitchen floor, tears clogging up my vision terribly.

I never noticed how he crept up behind me and snatched the corded telephone I had been clutching in my hands and flung it at the window. I remember how the kitchen window had been closed, how it shatter and clipped my skin with its ripped pieces. How frightened I felt, seeing my father walk calmly away from the destruction he'd caused.

I bled even more because of my wincing. I'd been still kneeling when he struck the window, and every time I moved I could feel the pieces crunch beneath my bared knees. I gathered the broken glass as much as I could, but by the time I'd managed to stand without wobbling, I'd already started crying in earnest. I didn't hold back, and my whining, wretched sobs were great heaving, hiccuping ones. Dry, retching motions, but I hadn't eaten and so nothing was thrown up.

I'd stumbled out the door and learned my lesson well. I was never to wait for the boy I liked. I was never to speak to him, to hear him, to be friends with him, or to talk about him. He was gone, but I was still there. My father was, too, and he wrenched that phone away from me so violently because it was a reminder of the past. Perhaps he disliked it. In that case, maybe so should I.

So, I had learned my lesson. It would be the first in many I would learn from him. I was only eleven. I took the only photo I had of the boy I liked and ripped it up into pieces.

xx

It was my first year of high school. I was withdrawn and I had even wanted to go back to my cheap, suburban home when I first entered past school doors. My mother had soon died after we moved to Jump. I had to walk to my high school.

For the longest time, I pitied my mother but loved her, nonetheless. Her face was lined, her eyes sad. She had worked so hard and sometimes I cursed whatever god was out there who laughed and mocked her efforts. I remembered how tired she was. I remember my anger.

I remember her tears.

It was my first year of high school when I first saw them.

Moving away was a horrible choice and I never wanted to have transferred to Jump City. I was too young to complain, though, and shortly after the move my mother had just died and I was so confused and the boy I liked had moved far, far away—too many changes, too many happenings, not enough time to adjust. I hated the sun and I hated the sea and I hated how there was no snow, no cold, no trees—_not mine, not mine—_only beaches. Sand, hot and gritty. Salt and brine on the air, couples on the walks...

I quickly learned that Jump was nothing like my gentle, northern town, which was far and safely tucked away from the coast. Perhaps my father liked that quality, the heat and the distance. Perhaps that was why we moved.

The first time I saw them was when I was walking the streets, walking through hazy waves that fairly seared off the pavement. Not many people were out, but I still felt like I was suffocating from the conundrum of being in a crowd. The heat was oppressive and my uniform clung to my skin as second flesh; it was the first time I was grateful for the hideous plaid skirt because it was a skirt and I was dying.

The cheap soles of my heels had felt like sticky plastic peeling off of the sidewalk, as bubblegum was wont to do. I wish I had been able to drive. I wish it hadn't been so hot.

I wish I hadn't turned that corner.

It was the first time I saw his face. Bizarrely, the monster that was attacking the city block should have been the first to catch my attention, but it wasn't. I'd seen far worse horrors in my online browsing and in my morbid books of death and angst than what I saw towering over buildings of concrete and mirrored windows. I felt like someone had suddenly thrown me into a fishbowl and I saw nothing but the warped outside.

Surreal. The city was being destroyed, but I could only see his face. It was with rapid blinks that I dispelled the image until it finally went away. I forced my vision to do just that. Fighting was all over the place, a brawl consisting of what surely must have been heavy duty fines and enormous property damages. Were they covered? Were they insured? Similarly inane thoughts like those swirled in my dazed head, and I did nothing but stand there and stare.

The Teen Titans, my mind supplied. I'd heard of them. Not interested.

I turned to leave. I was late.

The standardized test I took had torturous little bubbles to fill up, but I wasn't paying attention. I ended up missing the seventeenth line, thus all my answers #18 and up were automatically wrong.

My eraser was clammy towards the end of the period, and I smelled a faint unpleasant, acrid burning rubber smell; I'd been erasing too hard. I'd erased all my answers. My mind never wandered after that.

xx

I was eighteen and I could finally get out. I packed my things, left my father behind, and quickly moved downtown. It was hotter, filthier, busier, and louder than the suburbs I had lived in before, but I gritted my teeth and went bravely job hunting. My father hadn't wanted to deal with legality issues so as of now the state believed I was living with a guardian; I lived in a cheap 3k unit and I hated it. My own father hadn't wanted me anymore.

But if there was one thing I took away from my mother's death, it was that my father was reasonably calm if he was fed tea promptly after his work. By the end of middle school years, he'd come home, red-faced, from the stress of his work and the incompetent employees he had hired. I wondered why he bothered. I made the mistake of drawling that once.

I duly noted how his complexion turned beet-red.

As a result, tea, I realized, was the answer to hold peace within our little household, my small effort towards happy homemaking. Tea was to be calm. Tea was to be soothed. Tea was our balm. The cheap house smelled nice after that. The gas bills were something less to be desired, so he bought us an electronic heater shaped as a quaint pitcher. I boiled our water in that. The stove was rarely used.

I hated tea, but I grew addicted. Like how a man would fidget and twitch out of nervousness because he was denied of his addicted thing so, too, did I drink tea. I drank obsessively. I drank impulsively. I'd have some constantly on hand. I'd have some beside my homework. I'd even have some bottled and cooled at my bedside table. It'd be the first thing I would offer my father when he walked in through that door. Not a kiss, not a hug, not even a hello or goodbye. I'd give him his damn tea and we'd be on our way.

Not a word of gratitude. I never kicked up a fuss. Silence was the result, blessed silence without one noise of strife. It was glorious.

My room was small, but like how I maddeningly sipped tea in an almost religious fashion so did I also upkeep my room. Obsessively. Insistingly. I'd attack those dust mites, paranoid my father would hear the sound of them setting. He would slump, practically dead, in front of the fizzing T.V., but he would jump awake at the slightest noise. It unnerved me, scared me, and I learned to tread very softly over thresholds after that. I learned to avoid squeaking chairs, clicking on lights, and steal away quickly, quietly, carefully up to my room.

I learned I liked the darkness best, especially when dusk would rip away the sunlight from our grimy windows and let long awaited, eager shadows creep in. But our house would become cool, my father would become irate, and tea was served again. My father liked the godforsaken climate of the place we lived in. He liked the sunlight, the heat, and would click on and off the stove for his pure amusement had I not have stolen the spark plugs. He still probably didn't know what was wrong with it. My father was primitive, angry, and looked down on women who worked, looked down on me, looked down on my education, my clothes, my hair, my eyes—

I hadn't inherited anything from him. I think he liked to glower at my face precisely because I didn't seem to have any of his genes. I think he would equate genes as name tags. Had I have inherited any visible traits from him, I think that would help solidify that I was his property.

But I still had brought him his tea, damn it.

My father also liked to read the garbage of his newspaper and point things out to me. He'd drag me over, make a fuss over an article, and then demand to know why this and that happened here and there. Angrily.

It was annoying, and I learned to read journalistic writing pretty quickly after that. Thank god for the clinical nature of those press-fearing men—my father didn't consider females very columnist-worthy, apparently. My father never allowed me the luxury of a summary, so I had to answer his unreasonable, garbled demands based on his moods while keeping the other eye on the tiny, printed words in question. I learned to read his moods fairly quick.

If his eyebrows were raised high on his forehead it meant he was skeptical, moody, and all too happy to go off on a yelling spree if I didn't turn do something right then, if I didn't soothe his ruffled feathers. He liked it when I let him wallow in his imaginary, biased fantasy where the article was completely different and I never could understand his obsession with world affairs and free speech. I got too creative in my verbal editing sometimes, and my father would break free from my hold. I learned to be dull, monotonous, and detached when spinning a wild, impromptu tale. I learned sarcasm, the subtle art of putting double meanings beneath my words.

If his fingers were twitching, though, that meant I had to do something immediately to get the paper out of his sight or some _thing _would burn. My father smoked and I would balk at the day he figured out he could use his heavy, faux gold lighter as a possibly lethal weapon. He could chuck it at my head for instance and that would leave more than a mark. I never dared to imagine how creative he could get with a portable flame because, sometimes, I feared my face would give my horror away.

I learned to be stoic-faced after that, whether from concealing my own revealing thoughts or from letting my father delude himself in a world where he ruled supreme. Whatever, I was done with him.

But damn the man for having shaped me into what I was. I was sharp because of him, of the masochistic training I'd put myself through as a teenager. My mind categorized events, things, memories, sounds, words, faces, books, food, games, schooling, families, and tea all in a severely organized system. Despite the unorthodox learning I'd picked up from living with my ticking time bomb of a father, I still learned that logic was the true ruler of this world. Nothing could top it, not even my egotistical father.

I think I clung to logic in those days. My education, which was so boring, was something I overwhelmed myself with. I drowned in knowledge. I devoured science for breakfast. For example, if I were on a desert island with nothing but little children around me as food of course I'd take the smart way out and eat them. Cannibalism was a perfectly liable way to survive and morals and stereotypes and religion and philosophy only got in the way of the cold, clinical approach of science.

Not that I would really eat little children, but my father would. He really would. And that was what scared me.

So, yes, I clung desperately to books with wide, terror-stricken eyes that were bloodshot and pulsing with red veins about to burst with blood, so, yes, I clung.

There was something liberating about writing. Passion. Excitement. Zest. Gusto. What were these things? I only shook my head and backed away at these concepts, but what were they? Why did people take away joy from these things, how were they enjoyable? And what was it about the delivery of opinions that those journalists pulled on the written page and angered my father so? The world I had lived in my high school years was prickly and boring and monotone and routine, but I never thought to break free of that monotony. That security.

When I got my new apartment, I was overwhelmed. With color, with sights, with sounds, with joy—never mine, but other people's aplenty—and I heard music banging away in the room next over and sex thumping from the ceiling above.

I was overwhelmed.

Writing was a sinful habit I indulged in, always quick, quick work and then I was done. I would jot things absently in class. I would stuff homework under my sheets for secrecy. I would lock the front day and begged whatever god out there to pity me, to not reveal the stashes of notebooks I hid around the house. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't; gods were finicky that way. Despite the illogic nature of prayers, I still relied on them because it was all I could do.

Writing was liberating. There was something beautiful about pens arching across the page, about the cheerful crinkling of a brand new notebook, and how ink glowed so crisply, so precisely, in the dimming sunlight.

My god, I loved writing. Feelings I had never given name to before burst forth from my hands. Thoughts I never allowed to cross my mind was suddenly laid bare for all the see. It was dangerous, exciting, and masochistic. I trembled at the thought of discovery, but at the same time I lived for the day my father would see such passion his daughter had withheld from him. I wanted him to be spat upon and I wanted him to know I was no puppet, no tool, no potted plant. I was a living, breathing, _existing_ human being.

There was something so deliciously daring about leaving evidences of my writing behind. It was there, scrawled behind the toilet. It was there, scratched into the metal of the stove. It was there, etched into the ripped recliner he so loved to doze upon.

It always felt like a dastard, taboo crime to embellish the the pages of a notebook with my scrawl. While I was in my home. While I was at school. My rapid, smooth strokes developed from their panicked, frightened, terrified illegible chicken scratch to delicately curved letters, not quite cursive, not quite print, but beautiful nonetheless. It was there, my life, evolved in the form of the English language.

I loved it. My teachers from sixth grade only shook their head whenever I turned something in, always in despair of the written work neither they nor I could make any heads or tails of. Seventh grade brought tentative tenor in my writing, a spike in what I allowed in creativity, and my grades rose for it. At that time, I had also developed a crush I'd blown out of proportions, of a boy unreachable, untouchable, detached far from my reputation. Eighth grade was—

Eighth grade was...when tea really started to become necessary. Whatever progress I had made, whatever improvement in my effort, participation, work ethics—gone. Vanished. Downplayed work for what was clearly suppressed intelligence, my teachers once again despaired of me. It wasn't a feeling I was unfamiliar to, but it was a pity that it was my effort they found fault in then and not any eligibility complaints.

My father despaired of me. Such disappoint in his eyes. He never beat me—no, but he did something far worse. He ignored me. He sneered at me. He neglected me. He never cared about me. Fathers were kind. Fathers protected you. My father—_that man_—was never...was never...!

Why was I born? Did he create me? Just to serve him? Was I a servant? Was I not even a person in his eyes? My own father despised me, tolerated me because I was of some use to him, but he'd always advert his eyes. I cleaned his home. I cooked his food. I even paid for his damn tea by all the odd jobs I had to do in secrecy—thank god those craggly, old ladies never thought twice to ask why Mr. Roth's little girl was so willing to tidy up, mow the lawn, walk the dog, etcetera, etcetera?

Women were of little worth to him, and his daughter even less, but what of his daughter who was also a _working_ girl? I was so tired and worn out by the time I turned fourteen, I looked old enough to have light jobs and my father had given his consent blindly because since when had he cared to look at my report cards before? He signed away with only a glance, uninterested in my efforts and disinterested with my life. It didn't matter;, that negligence allowed me to obtain parental consent for the jobs I did. Smalls jobs, light ones, odd ones. I eventually got a working permit during high school. I finally was able to get us some decent food; I was so sick of scrounging for leftovers to turn into our weekday meals. Working real part-time jobs accomplished little things like that and I felt a small triumph every time I got my paycheck.

My father never found out. He had never given a damn what I did outside of the house.

xx

In all the upheaval of my move, I'd forgotten how hastily I'd thrown my toys and playthings into boxes. How hard I was crying. How I gripped my clothes and tried to tear them apart with impotent child fingers. How hurt I was that he was suddenly gone. I took all the memories I had of him, everything I'd ever associated with him, and packed it away in a shoe box. I was in such despair of the move, I'd chucked it blindly into one of the furniture, one that was already stored in the back of the truck, never realizing it was my mother's.

When I was eighteen and I had been preparing to move out of my father's house, I had finally found out what was in that box.

There was a box within the forgotten, dusty drawer of an ancient, creaking dresser. In my blind, silent haste in packing my things up, I'd ripped all my clothes from their hangers and shoved what few mementos I had stuffed away hidden around the house. I took all my notebooks with me, but I had been going through my mother's old dresser, shoved in the basement, when I found a fraying shoe box.

I stared at my discovery, hardly aware how I could barely breathe, and my trembling fingers ghosted across its surface. Dust had come away at my fingertips like peeling, flaking, rotting flesh and the lid was streaked with smeared gray. I opened it.

When I was a young, girlish thing, I kept a diary. Filled with fanciful musings not even worth a glance, I still flipped through its yellowed pages, at wonderment with the sight. It was once a precious _something_ to me, something I'd once dearly cherished. Writing. Writing from an old life, years past, but a piece of who I was, what made up me. It was a momentous moment when something fell out. A class picture.

I was seized with grief. Faces I recognized, but could hardly remember. Voices that were long gone. Impressions, fleeting and quick, leaving nothing behind. My eyes hungrily had run through those endless rows of faces, those long rows of meaningless names, when I stopped short. Panicked, I tried again, and it felt frustrating and eluding. The faces jeered at me, the names struck out at me, but I couldn't find the one person who mattered.

I tried again. The exercise was starting to feel like a tiresome word search where unnecessary letters did nothing but confuse, irritate, and hinder you. I was lost, afraid, and I'd stumbled away from that old dresser in disbelief of another revelation, a horrid discovery. I knew what was missing—what I was missing—and it felt heart wrenchingly clear.

I couldn't even remember his face anymore. His voice I had long forgotten, but surely his face—?

I tried again. Not even a surname jumped out at me. My hands were tight, white, and clammy, and the photograph was beginning to damage, but I never noticed. The edges crinkled. My eyes were beginning to fill.

I tried again.

xx

Some time after I got enough money, I was able to move out of my father's house, along with his consent. Or, to be more precise, he kicked me out of the house with all the blessings of the law.

Searching downtime for a new place was a whirlwind process that I hardly remember now. Streets started to look the same after the fifty-seventh one and I couldn't keep going seeing as I hadn't had enough to buy a car.

Dusk was falling. My favorite time in all the world, the inevitable transition between day and night. It was futile to fight its effects and, like always, I stood in awe of its stretching canvas sky.

It was over soon and people were starting to gawk. I moved quickly away, embarrassed I'd been caught at an intimate, vulnerable moment.

I still hadn't a home and the battered suitcase I'd been dragging along was making my arms wobble like jelly, and I felt weak. Wearily, I searched for someplace to sit down, anywhere where I would be out of the way from pedestrians, from those questioning gazes. Dusk had fallen, true, but so had night. Jump was always cold at night. The concrete metropolis had the same climate concept of a desert, bizarrely hot in the daytime and rapidly cool at falling sunlight. At least it wasn't humid. I wouldn't have been able to handle that; my clothes would have become insufferable.

Dinner. I had long forgotten to eat, and now I felt the clenching, echoing pains of hunger. Did I even have any money? I needed to save all I could for the place I was going to stay, but...

Pizza? Who the hell put a pizza parlor _all the way up there_? A balcony, more like, but...still, what the hell? Even my thoughts were disjointed, but my gut was feeling uncomfortable. I resigned myself to tromping all the way up to the second floor. My grip on my suitcase was tenuous at best and my legs wobbled in protest, but what else could I do? I was hungry and there was food. I cursed whoever mocked the hungry by the poor architecture—it wasn't like I could _fly_ up there!

Glorious, glorious food. My god were those employees a blessed sight by the time I got there. Before I knew it, I'd been ushered into a seat I'd gratefully taken and pulling out any cash the nice lady wanted—just give me some pizza and get away from me. I wasn't there to make nice, I wasn't there to look at your disgustingly smiling face, I was just there for food. Get. Away.

"All-righty! Coming right up!" the perky blond recited.

I groaned as my head hit the table. I was too tired to care. Probably would have a nasty bruise in the morning...

Downstairs, the arcade was still screaming away. I heard its buzzing and din and bouncing laughter drift all the way up the stairs. Funny. I'd have thought the balcony would have provided some degree of quiet. We were closed off from the rest of the building with doors, after all. I looked up, but there was no comfort to be had; the sky still lingered with dusty smog in the distance. The stars were gone.

Nothing ever lasted. Had they ever been there from the start? But of course...how else would I have known how far up the skies were?

For that one gut-wrenching moment which had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with tired, old pain, I thought to myself as I held up a longing, distant hand,

"You're too high to me."

* * *

I hope you liked the tone because she's so adorably sardonic I just want to hug her. There's an implied pairing scrawled all over the fic, but it's just that: implied.


	2. Interruption

Raven is sometimes out of character, but keep in mind she is a young girl for half of the chapter All narration lines are in present tense, but everything else should consistently be in past tense. Another character is introduced and it's my high school AU take on him.

* * *

When I was young, much too young, I liked a certain boy. I didn't realize it then, of course, but I did. It was only years later when I realized it, after remembering how I blushed furiously from my very first middle school crush, I realized that I was wrong: It wasn't my first crush. Not at all.

The first disappointment given to me came in the form of rejection. It was such a small thing, too, and not a big deal. Ridiculous, really, how odd I felt and how weird.

We liked to play with toys, he and I. We collected corny gaming cards and played video games that he totally killed me at, but it was fun.

Once upon a time, there was an action figure. Sort of like those blocky lego sets, but limber and more easily manipulatable. They even came in colors. I picked blue, his favorite color. He picked white.

I don't know why. I think he considered it cooler than mine. I was crushed, understandably, but I got over it. I grew to actually like my awkward little warrior and I used to think of the strangest storytelling circumstances with them. I was a very imaginative child, and lonely. I also liked to play with dolls. Stuffed animals. He didn't and I never invited him.

He liked these things called Crazy Bones, little figurines with twisted, ugly, contorted faces, but that was what he liked so we played. He had a whole bin full of them, thumb sized cartoon heads with the most bizarre of expressions but such character. Some had sneers, other had jeers, but they were all funny.

We'd line them up, he and I. We'd lay down across opposite battle fields, which consisted of the heavy, durable green lid of that toy bin of his, and challenge each other with these toys. If you threw a piece at the other, it was especially effective, but we never degenerated into squabbling children like that. Most of the time. But it was ridiculous, us two scrawny kids, laying there playing Crazy Bones. I don't even remember the rules anymore.

I remember his smile.

xx

Like I said, I liked hanging out at his place. There was a brook and a bridge and we once held a funeral service on top of it.

There were cracks between wooden planks, but the low bridge was very sturdy. I recall taking care of some insect creature or another until it died—or was it a pebble? Maybe weren't in the right of minds. But the boy and I, we held a funeral service. We laid the...whatever thing inside one of the cracks and picked moss apart from the bridge and used that as a cover. A dignified cover, moss in place of furbished wood. We knew the concept of death, at least.

What we didn't know was that I was going to fall into the water.

Why? Why did I stand so close. How annoying. Willow tree swaying beside us, we giggled and talked near the dirty, disgusting brook, and there was mud and we were on the bank. My foot slipped it—quite unpleasant. Put out from his laughter and disgruntled from my wet, disgusting sock, I hopped on one foot back to his apartment; I considered it a blessing that he lived on the first floor. I felt heavy and I think I was tripping at one point, but I was mostly disgusted. By my own foot.

He helped me, though. I'm pretty sure I was holding onto him all the way back.

xx

Before we were overwhelmed with new technology, we played simple, simple games. Like, how many water balloons could we make? How many would it take to fill up the whole bathroom? We weren't as ambitious as that, though. My house had only two bathrooms, and the dingier, colder one was in the basement and it was there where we worked. Faucet running, faces flushing, bodies cramped in that tiny stall, we would squish as many water balloons as we could onto those shower tiles.

Eventually, there were too many balloons rolling around and around on the tiles that we had to step outside the murky glass door to work.

We had run around, back and forth, furiously filling as many rubbery containers as we could. The sink faucet was turned on and off for whoever got to that porcelain counter first. The plastic bag of balloons was being emptied of its treasure, and the shower head was running for some reason or another. We were there, all afternoon, until our little fingers grew so numb we finally put a stop to the water-filling.

That bathroom was so cold. It was small, too. Our bodies were squashed together when we were lying side-by-side on the chilly, hard tiles, but we played our little games and were mocked for it when rumors went out about our little activities in a bathroom. The older children had run wild with them.

We didn't understand the concept of an innuendo at the time.

xx

Time passed, and exciting new ventures had to be explored. We liked to play card games and silly hand games and video games and we liked to sneak into arcades to see people game among themselves, leaving us stunned and watching in awe. The boy I liked had the privilege of joining in with the bigger kids and the corded controller of the GameStation banged away in his hands. Buttons pressed rapidly, punched into oblivion. Cord twisting wildly, madly. Calls that alternated between exuberant screamsand tears of frustration—we were that into the game. He was that into the game. He was that passionate.

Had I played as well? Of course I did, and I sucked. Badly. And those fighter games, two on two? We'd play against each other, he and I, because we were far too inconsequential to be considered worthy opponents by anyone other than us. So we played. Each other. Bashing away at the buttons, I'd often become very red in the face when he'd pull off intelligent strings of buttons signaling a combo or a technique. It was very frustrating, but soon enough he, too, would be bashing furiously away at the controller. We'd both become the most ridiculous of fighters—we'd get so competitive and mad at each other, we'd take it out, with our childish fingers, out on the characters.

Characters flashed across the screen—he'd always pick the biggest, brutish, scariest one of them all. I picked the pink, cute, bunny girl character. I hadn't even known at the time she was fan service, but would I have cared anyways? I was a simple girl then, influenced greatly by my beautiful mother, and so I'd bounce across the screen and wonder why I only knew how to kick and punch. And them? The onlookers who watched us scrawny children who eventually got brave enough to overwhelm ourselves in the arcade world?

I think they were laughing at us, he and I.

xx

One time, during winter, we were playing in my front yard. My street was an outlet and my house was all the way at the end, next to this old woman who'd let me tramp through her home and eat cookies at her kitchen table. I kid you not. They even had a pool game room in the basement, and I thought it glorious.

Even though I lived right next to a busy, active street, the sounds were a comfort to me. The sharp, acrid scent of gasoline always lingered in the air, familiar and consequently forgotten, and I could never disregard the noises of traffic, beeping, screeching, speeding, and zooming. It was all in the background to me, music, even, and I thought it glorious.

The boy I liked was never bothered by it either. I think my parents despaired of us.

There was a winter when snow was piled so high I couldn't see through our front window. And we had a big window, large and expansive, and it was beautiful. The snow was beautiful. I'd always eagerly wait for the December day when there was so much snow on our front porch, we wouldn't even be able to open the door. Our cheap, metal, swinging front door.

We liked the snow, he and I. We liked playing in it even better. There was one time we decided to be adventurous. We'd stumble through my driveway and make our way to the front of the lawn, standing there just to admire the view. A field of white, cheerfully crinkling and tinkling and glistening and glittering away.

I don't remember who gave that first mischievous smirk—was it him or me?—but someone threw that first object, I don't remember what. "Fetch!" we'd cheer to the other, and the other did. He'd tromp through the snow to retrieve the item, and I'd be cheering for his grand gesture, but ever ready to toss another one out into the yard.

We decided to make a maze.

It was...huge. We worked together, he and I, and we'd carve out low pathways all interconnected in that field of white. My neighbors blinked at us once or twice before shrugging our game away, but we had our fun. And when we were done, we made curving journeys. I'd go this way, he'd go that way. We'd always meet in the middle where the summer blossoming tree stood, silent and asleep.

Winding, confusing, treacherous pathways. We made stories along the way and pretended to become lost—only to be found. It was my greatest achievement, our greatest monument to the glory of winter. Our hands so numb they were tingly, our faces panting and hot and smiling, I was so happy.

I don't remember how it was destroyed, but it was. Maybe it was the inevitable approach of spring. Or the treacherous sun. Maybe it was even one of the punk neighborhood kids I never really liked. I remember we were mercilessly anal about whoever dared to moved a snow drift out of place. We hated it being disturbed. We hated the sneering jokes some rotten children played. We hated how it eventually all went away.

I made a snowman at the same time. Or was it another winter? In any case, it was my first. If my front yard was expansive, than the back of my house was truly a field. Vegetables in quaint, neat lines were grown there and we even had a couple of snarling, twisted trees clawing at the skies. I think my mother called someone to take one down.

I think I was sad. I was very emotional about my trees. They let off the impression that if one sat beneath their branches...I felt hidden away from the world. Or if I sat up in its tall branches, I'd be on top of the world.

But that day, I made my first snowman. I knew how to make one, of course, and I rolled big, fat balls and pilled them on top of each other. I'd given birth to its features in the form of rocks and I remember very nicely asking the trees for sticks and twigs.

The snowman died. Right in front of me, a neighborhood boy, who didn't like me, came running by and ripped it open, snow flying, and I think I almost cried. I had wanted to show it to the boy I liked when he came over again. I was alone, dead snow at my feet.

We lived very close. I was always at his house or he was always at mine. He lived in the tiniest of apartments, but I never felt claustrophobic. He lived simply and his mother was very beautiful. There was always another boy over, though, and I think it was his cousin. That older boy was always stuck indoors playing his GameStation, and he didn't even had the same last name as the boy I liked. Toad, Todd, or some other; it was very odd.

We whispered and we murmured, and then it was decided: the boy I liked wanted a drink. I wanted a drink, too. We both wanted the same thing so we teamed up, like in all things, to sneak into the kitchen—a treacherous journey! We had to slip out of his room, crawl to the sofa, and crouch behind its shielding back. His cousin or some other kept playing, oblivious, but I think it was safe to say we never fooled him; he just never cared.

We both rushed across the floor and I think our triumphant cries gave us away anyway.

I don't remember what happened next.

xx

That was the story of my life. Never remembering what was next. Flashes and hints and just on the tip of my tongue and out of reach, I'd see things in my peripheral vision and catch reminders of him.

I tamped down the impulse to look every time. The boy I liked—the boy I _knew—_wouldn't be standing there, waiting. He was gone. My first friend was taken from me. Dead. For all I knew, he _was_ dead.

It was better to forget. It was so hard though...

"So, so, so, why won't you tell me? C'mon, Raaachel!"

...with this kid in my _face_.

"West," I said, brows furrowed and temple pulsing, "...shut up."

Still enrolled at the local high school, he did the whole part-time job gig on top of his schooling.

He liked to eat, sleep, and crash at my place. I had the misfortune of living in the same apartment complex as him; he was the neighbor next door with the tasteless, loud music blaring in the background. Of course I would know his comings and goings. Apparently, he had a hobby involving him, the city, and a masochistic lack of rest because he spent hours out in the streets doing...something. I wondered how in the world he juggled those three things when I learned he never did his assignments anyway and _of course_ that explained everything.

On top of consuming weeks worth of my grocery, monopolizing my meals, Wally liked to play hooky and skip out on school all for me. He'd amble into my room and kick up a fuss until I'd give in to his unreasonable demands. This time around, however, he was ditching work, and it would be his sixth part-time job where he would get laid off, if my predictions were true. They generally were.

"You walked here, didn't you?" I said. "You don't need my car for anything if you were willing to get this far."

I finally get my car, and it's rented every other day by the ambitious Wally West who still hadn't the decency to fill up my tank. He paid me in food and I'd long given up on buying anything for myself because I'd end up hiding food in my own home. Evidently, he had somehow become my grocer boy. How demeaning. I wasn't even that much older than him and I depended on him to survive.

"C'mon," the boy needled in that teenager-inherited whine. "Just 'cause I walked home from school doesn't mean I want to walk anywhere else!"

"You didn't walk home. You walked here, to my room. Your apartment's the next one over or have you forgotten? What are you planning to do with my car now?"

Wally smiled. "Nothing, of course," he said, evading the question nicely. "I just wanna, y'know...borrow it for a sec."

"Again."

"Again." He nodded, as if that one action explained everything. "I'll even pick up a little something on the way back. Do you like waffles? I know a guy who makes waffles, great waffles. Want me to get some waffles for ya? Oh, good, because I like waffles, too!"

Incredulous, I shooed him away. "Go and take the car. Go away! I'm not interested in your waffles. I don't care if I starve; no one eats waffles for dinner, and certainly not me."

"Pizza? I know you want some."

"No. No, I don't."

"Aw...too bad. I'm bringing some. Mm, all that fatty cheese and drippy grease and sagging toppings that fall right into your lap..."

I held a hand up against a throbbing temple. "Go, then," I muttered. "Go get your damn waffles, but I am not paying."

"You don't need to." How quick he was to assure me. "I know the best guy to go to for waffles, free and on the house!"

"Wait," I said. "You've been feeding me from some restaurant...all this time? Outrageous. I'm broke. No wonder."

"Nah." Wally shrugged, buffing his nails. "I just know a lot of people. I don't hole myself up in cheap apartments and bang away at centuries old typewriters. I'm out there, you know...calling up favors and stuff. This guy I know is a great cook and you've been eating _his_ stuff the entire time."

Wary, I said, "Right, so why am I paying you for food in the first place...?"

"Oh. That's just for the ingredients."

I twitched. My eyes narrowed, and his gaze was suddenly all too innocent.

"...What?" he said.

"I give you seventy a week, and all that goes into...ingredients. Are you insane? This is what I've been tossing my money out for? Stuff you won't even trust me to cook on my own, but shill out to some guy who keeps trying to feed me meat and pastries?"

His mouth opened, then closed, and then opened again. "You, uh...get freshly prepared waffles?" Wally's grin was hopeful.

I slowly arose from my chair.

He took a step back and tried again, coughing, "You can't cook?"

I kicked him out.

xx

An odd thing I noticed about my neighbor. When he was on his feet, he looked totally relaxed and at ease. With his shuffling walk and slouched back, his oversized hat did wonders to flop into his face, and his grin was easy. Easy to come, easy to go, it didn't matter; he always looked _content_.

But when he was sitting, he was completely on edge. It was like his bum was inflamed and he couldn't stop fidgeting. He couldn't stop moving. It was all I could do not to throw my hands up in exasperation or chuck a pencil at him, but he never explained his discomfort to me. He only gave me this half-smile and fiddled with his watch.

His baggy pants always swayed with his kicking feet. One day, he would be tense and ready to jump out of his seat and the next day he would be scrunching up his face childishly, swing his feet back and forth and acting like the impudent brat he was.

School, though, changed his whole demeanor. There was something impatient about the way he tapped his pencil, tapped his feet, tapped his desk—was the homework that aggravating to him or was he simply bored? The answer was the latter: Wally looked bored. Wally looked so bored with his assignments, he'd doodle on them, punch holes through his papers, and wear the pencil's lead down through sheer tapping alone.

The kid never did his homework, but he knew the _answers_. Why not write them down if they were all up in that head of his? But he never did, not even on the threats of detentions, and I once had hope for him when he dropped by the local library, but he came out the same as ever, looking possibly even more bored.

I'd see him _read_ his textbooks, but it was like he could tell whenever my eyes were on him because his shoulders tensed up and he started to take longer to turn the pages. As if he were forcing himself to dissect every word, every paragraph, in a stiff effort to slow down. Apparently, he didn't like me watching him read.

I couldn't understand my neighbor at all.

"Where are your parents?"

Wally would shrug, pointing out a letter grade to me. "See here? They wouldn't care about them as long as they stayed up. I don't even see them anymore, and I stayed with my aunt back at Central."

Staring hard at the report card I held in my hands, I glanced at him. "Why are you showing this to me? It's not necessary."

Something glowed in his eyes then, and his lips tugged with his smile. I nearly jerked back—his voice was fond. "You're always badgering me to study so I figure this would shut up your complaints nicely, lady."

"Since when do you study."

"Since I got these grades up," he said with practiced aplomb. "Anyway, the teach wants a sig to go with, but—"

"Wait, wait, wait—me? You want me to sign this? I'm not your guardian."

"...But I'm not going to get it signed."

"What?"

"Of course you're not my guardian, Rach. The teach just thinks my effort's rot and wants confirmation that I got these grades _legit_, but I'm not going to get it signed." His smile widened. "I got what I came for and it wasn't your signature."

"If you're trying to confuse me, you're doing it quite aptly," I said. "Is there a point to all of this?"

"Even if you're only a couple of years older than I am, you know I look up to you, right?"

My eyes blinked in surprise, then narrowed. "Wally...?"

"Because, y'know, I just wanted to say that if...you know."

"No, I don't know," I said as calmly as I could, though there was no denying there was something—off about him. "Wally...what are you talking about? Why are you saying this to me now?"

He flashed a cheeky grin. "I'm just telling you this because I'm going traveling around the world and I might die from some disease or another."

"Oh. Is that all."

"You don't sound too sad," he pouted.

"Why are you really going?"

He didn't even skip a beat when he shrugged, but his shoulders had stiffened. "Truthfully," Wally said, drawing out the word, "I'm like James Bond and I gotta go after the bad guys all around the world."

Face scrunching up, I drawled right back, "You're no James Bond."

"No, but I'm a superhero, don't ya know?"

"Hah. Likely story. You just want to get out of Jump for awhile. It's your spring break soon, isn't it?"

"Eh, looks like you got me. My friends want me to tag along this time around."

"Case in point: you're going to be gone for a long time. Your friends are...well, shouldn't you be off packing? Getting your carry-on ready? I swear if you don't know how to follow airplane regulations by now..."

"Hey, hey," he laughed, "of course I know all those dumb airport rules."

"Yes, you better have; you certainly have traveled enough times."

Another flicker of the eyes before he smiled. "But if I get busted in a foreign country or lose my passport or something, I'll give ya a call. How's that?"

"Please don't," I drolled. "Like I said, I'm not your guardian. Go take your troubles off somewhere else; I don't want to get involved."

Something eased in his expression then, so quick it was almost lost in the transition as he smiled. "Well, that's good, Mommy. Could you hold the fort over here?"

"I'm twenty-years-old, Wally. I'm not going to become a starving college student _in the span of a week_," I said. "Don't worry about it."

He didn't even flinch. "Feed yourself well. Don't get fat. Get some sunshine and fresh air! Mind my apartment, and don't forget to smile when I get back."

"Fine. Shut up. No. Yes, and no."

"Aw," he said.

Before he was out the door, I sighed. "And Wally?"

He pivoted. "Yes'm?"

I tapped the report card, but stared at him. "I am proud of you...but I could care less about what this says. I don't _care_ that you only did this for me...You could've just told me you were dropping out."

Wally faltered, but then he glanced away, small smile forming and face wry. "That's why I like you best, I guess. You could always see right through me." He turned back to me. "But, Rachel, not everything is as it seems. Are you...angry with me?"

I shook my head, beckoning him over. He did so warily and was taken aback at my hug. "Listen," I mumbled into his shoulder, clutching him close. "Listen. You may take as long as you want...you were never meant to stay put. To be trapped. You may go all over the place, but forget about me. I'm not moving anywhere. I can't...go where you can."

He didn't do anything, but wrapped unsteady arms around me and his breathing was uneasy. His voice was quiet. "Why won't you let me help you?"

"You already have."

I didn't need to see his face to know his feelings on the matter. He pulled away and took my hands in his. They looked pale and delicate and sickly compared to his warm hued ones. The differences between us were overwhelming. Reminders often came in the little things like that. My voice was firm. "You already have," I said.

"If that were true," Wally said, words at a low, tremulous tenor, "then you wouldn't be scratching out everything you type. You won't ever show me what it is you write. You always prepare to throw away the feelings you let out on paper. I haven't helped you at all."

Our loosely clasped hands tightened, and my eyes closed with a faint sigh. "It's because...I don't why I'm writing anymore." My lips twisted into something bitter. "It's funny, isn't it? I never write for myself."

"Who do you think he is? The guy you always see in your sleep."

Chest aching, I looked out the window. "The person...?"

"Yeah?"

My eyes were distant. "The person I always used to write to."

* * *

All of Raven's nostalgically described memories are based on real ones from my childhood, which is why some of them are incredibly specific on details. I wanted the innocence of her childhood to stand out in sharp relief to her jaded present, but it doesn't really work because Wally's too good at brightening up the tone.

The tone is based off of the anime movie _5 Centimeters Per Second_, which is about two inseparable friends who grow up and apart and have completely forgotten each other as adults. The woman goes on with life, reasonably happy, whereas the man is jaded and driven by the vague sense that he's _missing something_.


	3. Priorities

Wally's POV. A bit wistful, a bit jaded. Very disorganized in the last part, but it's meant to be slapdash and messy, including the frequent tense changes.

* * *

Just watching something that lies so faraway—

I understand why Rachel looks different from other people. At the same time, I understand that she never looks at me. Because of that, I didn't say anything to her that day.

Rachel is kind, very kind...but she's always looking at something so far away that I can't see. My wish won't be granted—as corny as it _sounds_, but it's not. Corny, I mean. But I...I like Rachel even after today, the day after tomorrow, forever. I don't care if this is masochistic or what—I don't _care_, okay?

Rachel is my friend. She's solitary and alone, smart, intelligent, and frickin' _wise_. She always knows what to say to me at all the right times. She's so attuned to my moods, especially in the beginning, that it scared me a little...to know that she would know how I was feeling long before I did. That intuitiveness wasn't something I was used to.

For the longest time, I'd given little thought to my cover. I never wanted to be enrolled in an high school. I didn't want that. After I became this super fast freak, I didn't have time for school.

I wanted to protect my family. I wanted to protect my aunt, who cared for me. I wanted to protect my uncle, who would do everything for me. I wanted my parents to see me and realize what they were doing wrong. I wanted them to love me. I wanted them to care. They never approved of my so-called 'profession,' and we cut ties soon after that.

I joined their group only because Robin bothered to ask. I didn't care about any of them, but if Dick wanted me to be there for him, I would _be _there for him. I was put undercover in the city and lived there as a sleeper agent. For years I suffered public education, whereas I was home schooled before. I'd gained my powers a child, after all. No one knew about me, especially _that _part of my life, and I was rarely put out in the field with the others. I worked alone.

It was an advantage. As they lived in a giant tower in the middle of the harbor, they couldn't very well slip into the city and infiltrate its workings. They never could pass off for civilians, not even Dick who would never take off the mask, the front, the persona, for _anybody_. He was lost in his superhero identity and he didn't know who he was anymore. But was it fair to ask the same thing of me? Did I ask to downplay my abilities and keep watch of their city? I wanted to help, but my powers were starting to fail on me and I grew even more frustrated and alone.

It was pure coincidence that I met Rachel. Keeping low, I often changed apartments all roughly within the same area. I never liked the places I lived in throughout the years, but it let me go out alone, undetected. Nobody cared what everybody else did, and it was so perfect for me. Convenient as hell. I didn't mind the filth so much, but even if the neighborhoods I chose to live in were run-down, it wasn't as bad as the slums.

I knew what the slums were like. I went out all around the city and took note of what I saw. I kept my cover, laid low, and spied for information whenever I could. I never took Rachel's car in there. That wasn't where I took her car.

"Yo! It's you again."

I grinned, heart lightening at the sight. The shop smelled like grease and disel and that metallic city _twang_, but I never minded it so much. Familiar and comforting, I knew how to deal with it. Coming out from behind the latest car he'd been working on, Victor looked like he was doing well, with his enormous sweater marred with streaks of oil like always. Looking like a delinquent, his garage was as rundown as any part of this neighborhood.

I didn't care. My civilian role enabled me into his good services. "Yeah, buddy. I'm here for the same thing as last time," I said.

He shook his head, smiling. "For your little lady, am I right?"

I still kept up my grin—Rachel was _no one's_ little lady. "Yep, for the same girl. Same extensions as before, but..."

Vic held up a hand. "Keep it light and simple. I know, man, I know. I'll fix it right up." And he laughed. We grinned at each other and I made casual small talk as I grilled him for the info I needed. The mechanic blathered on in his own carefree way, and I got what I wanted.

With him, I could let my guard down. It was a refreshing feeling, knowing that I wouldn't be stabbed in the back in his garage. Literally, metaphorically—whatever. I've gotten to know this guy. A part-timer, but a good one, though I haven't a clue as to why a drop out athlete from school would want to work with cars.

Well. It wasn't any of my business anyway.

I didn't need Rachel's car to do my job since I could, y'know..._run_. But I still worried about her. There were times where when I would think she'd stand in the middle of the street just to get run over. She wasn't suicidal or anything, but she was off in her own little world. She almost never paid attention to her surroundings, and she always looked sad cooped up in her apartment.

There would be a day where Jump would get screwed over, whether it be a rampaging alien invasion or a giant robot attack or another maniacal Slade encounter. If Rachel needed to skip out of town, she would have her car to do so. She was human. She didn't have superpowers. I wasn't doing anything at all secret-like or having any ulterior motives except making it easier for her to run.

I didn't want her to die. That was what I thought when I saw her disregard for her own _escape vehicle_. I was freaking scared for her because it was like she didn't even had any self-preservation instincts. She wouldn't know what to do if a villain got a hold of her or if she was confronted with the butt end of a gun. She didn't have that innate desire to survive, and that's human nature—or at least supposed to be.

She lived. She scrapped for odd jobs and was hurting for cash now and then. She went to the local cheap ass community college and would willingly go without food if it meant she could keep her finance balances straight. She absentmindedly walked around the city whenever she felt like it, and she liked to stare out the window at some _thing _I couldn't see.

That was what frustrated me, that she lived in her own little bubble. I never understood what she was living for and why she seemed so dull and quiet and perfectly happy to sink into the background. If I lived like the way she did, I would've done myself the service of drowning myself in the middle of Jump Bay. It was that quality in her that led me to mistakingly believe that she didn't even care about her own life—actually, it'd fairly pissed me off.

Until I started to bother and badger her daily out of idle boredom, I never realized how _intensely _she closed herself off. I thought I kept my emotions deep down, hiding it with easy grins and smiles, but she took a different route. She would completely emotionally shut down. Those days were rare, though, and it wasn't like she acted like a robot or anything. It was just that she...

She loved like any other person, but she wasn't living with the vitality of someone who was bursting with emotions. And she was, she really was, because underneath that perpetual scowl and stoic features was a person who was desperate for life. Craved for it, even.

I looked through her things once, but hell if I'm sorry for doing it in the first place. I'm glad I did it. She had her typewriter set out, as she usually did, but this time she had a sheet of paper still stuck in, half finished. I admit it, I guiltily leaned over and read what she'd said.

Holy crap was that an eye opener.

The thing about Rachel, see, was that she was too faraway. She was so...so _detached_ from everything and everyone that it pissed me off, I guess. Always, there was this niggling sense of _wrong _about her. There was something about her apathy that struck me the wrong way. Something bad. Something...irritating.

I've had enough apathy in my childhood. I suppose I should have been used to it by now, those looks...I'm worthless, apparently, because I can't bother to take care of myself and be nothing but a punk and a—well, that was how civilians _looked_ at me. That was what they _thought _and _saw _when I dared to show my face and flaunt my stuff without the vibrant yellow suit, my stupid armor and shield—

God, why wasn't she _the same_? Nothing contemptuous. No accusation or sneering. She only took one glance at me and looked _away_. But that was normal, right? I mean, that's what everybody did.

But nobody ever stopped just there. They always had to take it a step forward and turn back towards me with a ready insult ready to leave their damn lips or that glint in their eyes that said—that said...whatever. It didn't matter anymore—couldn't leave me the fuck alone, but that was fine. I could take their glares, their judgments...their attitudes.

What I couldn't take was that simple apathy.

We were neighbors. Big deal. Neighbors were never one big happy family, after all, so it wouldn't be a surprise to know that we all carefully moved within the same building in our carefully bubble-crafted worlds in which we did nothing but move around each other and _ignore_.

So she didn't break that rule exactly. Why was I so _obsessed_ then? What compelled me to keep going after her and...

What was I trying to pull off? A smile? A laugh? Hardly; I hadn't liked her then and I sure as hell wasn't attracted to her at that point...so why?

Something about her eyes.

xx

She didn't like to go out much, and when she did it was as far from the city lights as she possibly could be. But it was unavoidable so she settled for less, quietly assessed her options, and went along, resigned, with the easiest choice in the matter. The easiest, placid, and _passive_ decision apparent to her.

Which was to just let herself go with the flow. She'd lose herself in crowds and come back home, disheveled, by the new anti-adventures she'd been non-swept away with. Because that was what it was—non-adventuring, I mean. Socializing. Mingling. I guess they could be considered adventures for her. There was something fragile about her state of mind, body, _whatever _whenever she'd return, but I never could figure out _why_. She was not a dainty, delicate thing, and yet...

Rachel looked like she was enjoying herself, but not on a conscious level. More like on a yearning, desperate, outstretched-hands-and-reaching kind of level. Unattainable. Bewildered, she let herself be thrown back and forth, only to come out of the chaos and...and what? What was up with her weird habits?

She was scared of it, though, wasn't she? People. What would push her to keep trying and trying and _trying_ when she knew there was no merit in what she was doing, nothing to be gained at all. She liked to observe people, pedestrians, whatever, but why not _mingle_? But she never did—she was always the observer. _Always outside_ and doing nothing but looking in. She was...she was always...!

Yearning.

"What's there to see?"

"There." Something gentle, soft, inscrutable, _calm_. "Up there. Only when it's night, though..."

"What, the stars?" Incredulity. "There's nothing but smog out there. They're too high up, anyway, to see anything down here."

"I know that," she said, arms reaching up in a futile effort to pluck at the night sky, and her eyes filled with pain. "I can never see it from here, that brilliance. Where had it gone...?"

"Why do you keep doing that?"

She knew the answer no matter how painful it was to acknowledge it, but Rachel was no coward. "I'm scared," she said immediately. "I don't know where to go or what to do from here. I guess...I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what I'm _doing _anymore. Am I running...? I'm always running away from _something_...I guess."

She'd answered. However faintly, but she'd still _answered_. And, damn it, if that strength didn't threaten to suck me in.

If only she could realize it _herself _now, that stupid girl.

xx

It was supposed to be easy. The Brotherhood of Evil wasn't ever a group of crazies to be taken lightly, but we hadn't known they'd be...this good.

"Get out of here!"

"I can heal," I snarled, slapping a hand to my bleeding side and _gritting my teeth_, "—I can fuckin' heal myself so shut..._up_!"

Understandably, I was a little under stress. Understandably, Robin didn't take lightly to this dastardly offense of undermining his authority. Pfft. Honestly. I wasn't going to _die_.

Not now. Not...ever. Yeah.

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon..." Stupid cells wouldn't heal fast enough. _Fastest boy alive_ wasn't just a fancy title there for show, you know. "Oh, for christ's sake! Let go of me, Star!"

You could always tell how pissed off Robin was in the middle of a fight by his actions. Whenever we faced Slade, for example, he'd always give off this ferocious snit of being all badass and not _needing_ us. Usually, Bird Boy was a killer leader, yes? Not today, apparently. I mean, why else would he send his girlfriend to fetch me?

I'm not a...a dog. I'm not helpless. But giving Birdy lip convinced him that I was helpless and stupid and that I couldn't fight anymore because...

_Apparently_ because I was all injured and doomed to bring us down and I was being a terrible liability because if the _fastest boy alive_ couldn't heal himself _fast enough_ then who in the hell were these Brotherhood of Evil freaks? Wrong with me? What is?

My grammar sucked in my own head. No wonder I didn't snag that English grade...I mean, it wasn't like people _study_ these stupid things, right? Finals, finals, finals—too many damn exams on one day and I ditched studying in favor of crime fighting, but, hey, that was my cover. My prerogative. Nobody expected me to be some little secretive mastermind genius. It was my cover, my civilian status, my disguise, my mission.

But...my last grades were excellent. Fantabulous. Not for English, though. Did Rachel deserve such a reward? She didn't even comment on it. My GPA was great. _Great_. It was just English. _Just_...

Goddamn it—I'm not _stupid_, so why couldn't I get that whole damn section right?!

Why am I even freaking out about school at a time like this?

I'm bleeding. Profusely. Badly. Relentlessly, tauntingly, badly, badly, badly, _badly—_

Oh. I've forgotten. My powers don't work as hot as they used to, do they?

That...would explain why everyone's in my face. Why Robie-poo's flippin' out. Why Starfire is flitting about this way and that looking for some goddamn witchdoctors in clean, white coats. Sterile hospital rooms—I can see it now.

But I'm not there. Yet? Maybe. I won't..._die_ or anything. Right.

"...in there, man. Hang in there, Wally!"

Garfield. Sounding unusually quiet. Solemn. The tone doesn't work for him. We were never friends, so...how do we know each other's names? Right. There was...an incident?

I don't remember much anymore, it seems. It's all a funny, fuzzy blur. Gah, clichés anyone? Rachel...hates clichés. The storybook ending. The princess being rescued by her fair and handsome prince. But Rachel's not like that.

She doesn't need anyone.

She doesn't need me.

Just last week, I was in the Arctic, freezing my ass off because some crazy pink-haired bint was living in some prehistoric _La La Land_ and she needed us to _rescue_ her—but not really. She didn't really need us. She did just fine on her own. I think. Auroras were pretty, though, weren't they?

I wish Rachel could've seen that. I wish she could've seen a lot of things.

Like how I totally kicked ass. Even with my faulty powers. Like how I could fly across the ocean 'cause of my _speed_.

I wish...I wish for a lot of things, 'kay? It's not like they ever come true. The world's unfair. Always was and always will be. Bitter? Nah, but I'm damn jaded now that I think about it.

When was the last time I really laughed? I smile. I laugh. But I don't _really_ laugh. Not really. Not like I want Rachel to.

Ah. Rachel. It all comes down to _Rachel_, doesn't it? Why am I so fixated on that girl? What's so great about her anyway?

Right. Since I technically am in love with her, I should say that every little thing's great about her, right? That's the right thing to say. The tactful thing. But the truth is Rachel _isn't_ that fucking great. In fact, it makes one wonder why the hell I like her in the first place.

She's rude. Socially inept. Her cutting remarks really _do_ feel cutting, and she won't accept charity in any form, shape, or _matter_ even if she's on the ground twitching from starvation. Prideful little thing. No self-preservation instincts. She wouldn't accept me as a friend, either, in the beginning. Stubborn about all the wrong things, and there's that childhood bastard who she's all _over _and someone I don't even compare to, apparently.

She holes herself up in her apartment after all I work I put into our interactions. And, boy, were there _a lot_ of interactions. She's so painfully self-conscious. But me? I never gave a damn what the grocer next door thinks of me if I dance in his aisles! And if I want to change something about myself, I go out and _do it_. There's no agonizing process where I sit down and be stricken in indecisiveness to the point where I can't even think straight!

I'm an action kind of guy. I _do_ things. I don't think things through sometimes, true. Hell, I'm impulsive and I even put my so-called team in danger. Sometimes. Robin's overanalyzing methods are not for me, but he's supposed to be my leader. I listen to him. I have my priorities. But are they really to this city?

Why did I even come to Jump in the first place? Why the hell am I risking my life to run all over the fuckin' _globe_ to save some stupid mutants who don't even appreciate their own power?

You can't even appreciate being a metahuman until you've come _this close_ to losing it, that pretty status. Well, I'm at that pit stop, baby, and I'm _losing it_. I was a kid when I got these niffty speed abilities. I loved 'em, abused 'em, but I was a kid_. _You expect a kid to know responsibility? To know laws or definite right and wrong? I enjoyed my powers freely. I loved them, I loved them, I _loved_ them. Crime fighting was..._is_ an adventure.

I'm dying. I'm dying and my goddamn powers aren't _working_ for me anymore. Not the ones that counted. Cuts, bruises, lacerations, crushed ribs? Hell yeah they'd be healed in a snap. Before.

Suddenly, it's no longer an adventure. It's not a storybook where a happy ending is magically guaranteed. This isn't a game of Life where you're assured you're not _really_ that loser player next to you who's losing all of his money and buying crappy properties like...like in _Monopoly_ or something.

It was supposed to be easy. The Brotherhood of Evil? Who the hell would fear a group of crazies with such a corny name like that?

I'd underestimated them. But not Garfield. He'd warned me over and over again to take the mission seriously, but I didn't listen to him. Yeah, I feel stupid now, but how could I put any stock into what _Beast Boy_ said? How was I supposed to take his Brotherhood of Evil horror stories seriously?

See, Garfield _knew_ these freaks of natures. He'd run around with the Doom Patrol before—_apparently_, a group of spandex-clad adults whose sworn purpose was to hunt down the Brotherhood of Evil. We'd teamed up before and Garfield felt some vestiges of filial piety or some crap of _some_ sort and went over to be Beast Boy of the _Doooom_ Patrol. Again. Ditching us. _Us_. And Robin already had his fill of up-and-leaving teammates before.

You had to feel sorry for him. But that didn't stop him from being all gungho about _forcing_ our help onto these group of _ad_-ults.

They called me cocky. Me, cocky? Please. If they even knew what I was capable of...

But they didn't. They didn't care a whit what I did or what I was capable of. Hell, I didn't even care a whit if _they_ were taken down. In our little journey to have a showdown between the evil crew and our two groups, loads of the adult members were tragically and brutally left behind by their leader, the asshole Steve.

I may not like Robin all that much, friendship aside, but I wouldn't have just..._left_ him there to die. Not like that Steve guy did to some of his teammates. Disgusting.

I don't form bonds easily. I'm not so carefree that I'd flittingly form friendships left and right, _contrary to belief_. You were either my friend or you were my enemy. And I had a lot of the latter and a little of the former. Enough said. I'm smiles and roses to practically everyone, but the people I'd stick _my_ neck out for...?

So. _So_...when did I become this goody-goody good guy? I was never out to please the public. For all that mattered, they could go to hell and I wouldn't even have blinked at the thought. Obligations...sure, I have some towards my team, but we never really clicked in the first place. Would I have risked my life for them?

The safe answer is no.

Why did I move to Jump? Maybe I was sick of my parents, sick of being under their authoritative thumbs. Maybe I'm a teenager in his stupid rebellion stage. I never put any stock into relationships with _adults_. How were they supposed to help us kids? What could they do? All adults cared about were their own damn necks.

Kinda like me, I suppose.

Brotherhood of Evil. Pfft. They wanted to take over the _world_, probably. Cliché. Boring. Done and _over_ with again and again in the media. I never took them seriously. I thought of chasing them across the world as a game. A game was fun and light heartened—something I could quit anytime I wanted to the moment it lost my interest. I did as I pleased. Maybe that was why Robin placed me as far as possible from the T-Tower.

Was Robin even my friend? I'd like to think we were. Friends, I mean, not just allies. Not _only _comrades. He was one of the few guys my age who I'd readily give my respect to. He was...anal at times, but he grew up under the Batman's mantle, hadn't he? No wonder he was as passionate as he was. No wonder he threw his all into his work. No wonder he considered crime fighting his _life's_ mission.

That determination. That frantic fervor that Robin threw his all into a fight. Why didn't I have that? It was admirable. The way Robin _fought_, he looked...

I have no motivation. If I had to save a woman from being squashed under a collapsing building or being burnt to a crisp in a forest fire, I'd probably be running in there to save her as fast as I could, only to be calculating whether I'd be late for my next T.V. show or not. I'm that kind of a guy. I take my pleasures as they come.

Crime fighting...? Crime fighting was a job description. I've never taken it seriously. Robberies and freaky robots bent on destroying our fair city are the norm, Jump's usual fare—and it was _boring_. This monotone routine that never changed. But the Brotherhood of Evil, who I've heard all these badass rumors about? _Yes_. My boredom would be alleviated, I thought. This would be fun. Another job I could half-ass and see if it did _anything_ in the amusement factor.

But I'm dying. I'm dying and it's _not_ fun. There aren't cliché flashbacks of my life happening before my eyes or a choir of freaky angels to send me running for Hell. It's simple _pain_ and pain...and, oh, _more_ pain. It fucking hurts.

My powers aren't healing in nature, of course, but I could speed up my body's natural healing process. A niffty trick that I only learned today was a straggling old geezer struggling to overcome his Alzheimer's. I knew my powers were slowly beginning to veer off the _effective_ course, but I never imagined...

I'm a hoarder. I like what I can do and I'm damn proud of having manipulated my powers to the extent I was able to. Who else can say 'I've walked through walls?' Who else can claim that they can cause miniature sonic booms with their _voice alone_?

Am I cocky? I wasn't so cocky as I was confident. But as my powers started failing on me, I...geez, I even had _Rachel_ commenting on my depressed staggerings to and from the apartment. I must've looked frightening. I must've looked pathetic.

I say all this lightly, but my ego really had taken a hit. My mood always was sour. I wonder how she was able to bear with my company for all those months. I was having a physiological crisis, and Rachel had no idea.

Between my bouts of extreme agitation and frustration, I had started to think about whether any of this worth it. Superheros and crime fighting...were they even worth anything? I was slowly becoming subpar in my worth ethics and any of Kid Flash's efforts to play Get Along with his teammates went straight to hell.

My civilian life, unexpectedly, had provided a shelter for my oh so fragile psyche. Right. I've always hated school. All you had to do was memorize a bunch of useless facts and then plug and chug in the answers into those little answer sheet bubbles.

The library was pivotal for my ultimate attempts at underachieving. All I had to do was zip in a couple of piles of textbooks into my brain for the day, and I was set for the entire semester. I slept during lectures. I could _eat_ whole subs at my desk and not drop a speck of mustard. Eventually, it turned into a game all on its own...'How many useless facts can I cram into my head so I can deflect all of my teachers' attempts at trying to trip me up?'

But beyond my asinine in-class behavior, school bored me. My teachers all had written me off as hopeless. I didn't care about my grades, but I studied anyway in order to purposefully be a _master_ at underachieving.

And, yes, that took a lot of thinking and calculating and analyzing.

There were few who realized I was much smarter than I looked. I ignored them, played the fool, but there were still those shrewd sidelong glances...And then there was that one weird counselor who tried to find ways to get me all motivated for school because she was convinced I was a genius or something. Flattering, untrue, but I guess I failed to portray my troublemaker demeanor to the fullest whenever I was around her. She was hot, after all, and could I help it if I had liked to talk _intelligently_ to her sometimes?

I think school made me stupider or something because I considered my brief conversations with Rachel to be mentally stimulating. But Rachel never wasted my time, not like school.

After I started losing my powers, it felt a lot easier to be relaxed around her. Like a hawk, she would squint and peer at me as if she could _tell_ there was something off about me, but couldn't quite tell what was exactly wrong. I had boundless amounts of energy. I fidgeted and my metabolism kept urging and urging me to get a move on. Rachel was smart, very smart, to start hinting to me about what kinds of nutrition to intake, but I'd given her too many opportunities to observe me.

Before the Brotherhood of Evil rolled its ugly face around the corner, I'd become apathetic as a Teen Titan. As I started to ease up to my civilian role more, I found that I could spend more time with my next door neighbor. It was...fun. Frustrating, but fun.

Why frustrating? Frustration walked hand in hand whenever I walked through her front door. Rachel never changed, not in the whole time I've been her friend. She's...static—never moving from the hole she'd dug and secreted herself in. It was frustrating because I wanted to see her change, to laugh, to smile—I guess I wasn't good enough.

I'm not so egotistical to say that I could _make_ her fall in love with me and make me the center of her whole damn universe, but...but couldn't she have at least tried? In the months we've known each other, could I say that I've made a difference in her life at all...?

I don't think I have. I don't think she would even care if I died _right now_. A very distinct possibility. I'm not going to laugh at death and shout to the skies that I'll beat the odds. The Teen Titans doesn't have a magic user that can heal us in a snap. We don't even have a technical genius who _knows_ how to use all those funny instruments doctors use.

Robin is...good. He's spectacular at technology when he wants to be, but his expertise doesn't lie in defense or security or the more _passive arts_ like healing. He's all aggression, all offense, all _attacks_.

Garfield, though, he knows how to hack pretty well. Actually, he's a damn good hacker because he wastes all his days on obtaining pirated video games. He's too unreliable to leave all of the T-Tower's security measures to and he has a bad habit of playing around with what security features he is entrusted with.

Garfield seems to treat a lot of things like a game, but his priorities are all about _being_ a Teen Titan, a crime fighting superhero, a good guy whom the public adores...

Such charisma. I suppose I could act as funny and easygoing as he does, but I'm not in want of the attention he prefers.

But at least he's sincere. He's the real deal, the kind of person who _does_ want to make the world a better place. The kind of guy who takes his job really seriously. He has...a passion like Robin, but whereas Robin is all cold steel and icy metal, Garfield is flaring, bursting, unconstrained _action_. A different sort of action from Robin's urgency, but they're one in the same...purposeful. Determined.

And I...have no such passion. I can't _be_ like them. I'm not like Garfield, who fights against all odds in order to save a child and charges headlong into the chaos acting on his feelings alone. I'm not like Robin, who plans three steps ahead, only to break free of his own restrictive bonds by throwing himself into danger to save a _loved one_, risking everything from his life to the mission. I'm not like them. I'm not that type of person.

I can't...do anything like that. I can't even help the one I love.

"R-Rachel," I coughed, "w-who's gonna help _Rachel_?"

"Please, friend, do not speak." A tremulous voice and a not quite brave smile—everything _wasn't _going to be okay, Starfire, and you know it...don't you?

"Flying..."

The arms that encircled me tightened. "Yes. You are in the air with me. You will...you will be treated well and soon you shall be able to walk freely."

Walk freely. What a joke. The fastest boy alive couldn't even _walk_ on his own, so now he flies...

"Kid Flash! Please, you must be awake." Her flying was starting to waver. "I could not bear it if you are..."

"I want to go back."

"No! We must not return to the battlefield. You are very injured."

I heckled at her attitude. My ire allowed me to see her, clearheaded. "Are we abandoning them? How can we just leave? Robin is still down there!"

Starfire shook her head. "It is over. We have lost even though the Brotherhood has fled. For now, it is best if we recuperate. The place of healing is there." She faltered. "I am afraid you are very injured."

The heavy fuzziness returned, and my vision careened into a blurred mess. I lurched forward—Starfire's flying was turning unpredictable. She was distressed, but it was exasperating how the girl's powers ran on emotion alone.

Mine wasn't like that.

I closed my eyes, feeling dizzy beyond words. "I'm not going to die," I said in a murmur.

"But how can you be assured of that?" There was a stricken undertone to her words. "Kid Flash, answer me."

I said nothing.

* * *

With Wally's infatuation, I'm really going for unrequited flip flopping feelings between frustration and helplessness. He does love her to an extent, but it seems more like he's trying to accomplish something with Raven for his own sake. A balance between being selfish and selfless. At one point, he angrily confronts himself on why she was so important to him by reeling off her bad qualities because, honestly, he's scared.

Otherwise, writing this fic is interesting because most of the action is translated into 1st person monologue. Anyway, with this chapter I've established two narrations in the story, and it's what I'm planning to stick with all the way through. I'm also following the main events of Season 5 as a guide, but I don't know what I'm going to do with Episode: Lightspeed.


	4. The Grays

Wally's tirade about his past based off of what little I know of his comic book history. His bitterness really stands out here.

* * *

The citizens of Jump had no idea who they owed their sorry asses to in the subsequent weeks after my little death stint.

I lived. Consequently, Robin would delight in reeling me into his world of leadership abusing and painful, terse sessions of lecturing. And, man, those were painful. Robin had a...way of railing in on you that made you feel not only incredibly guilty, but incredibly stupid.

I would feel less of the former and more of the latter. I refuse to feel guilt over refusing Robin's initial order of not giving the enemy chase should they flee. It had been a rule he'd established from the very start of our Brotherhood of Evil hunt, but I always thought it a hindrance, another example of Dick's sterling and stifling safety sense. Not only was he whipped by our girl _Star_, but he was obsessive about being the Ideal Leader.

What Ideal Leader...what the hell was that supposed to be? I hardly think Batman should be a template for his aspirations—but, hey, who am I to talk? In any case, Robin was—he was _not_ the Dark Knight. He wasn't even the proper sidekick! Do sidekicks skip half across the country to up and leave their mentors?

Robin was never meant to restrain that _height of his capacity_ business, much less his own. He was anal, an unforgivable perfectionist. Were he a fellow student of mine, I would've long slapped on the overachiever label on his head and left him alone to his all-nighters, laughing in the face of his baggy bags. I like my sleep, thanks.

Heck, he probably would've been one of those kids who'd have gotten into those uppity eastern coast colleges—all for Mommy and Daddy's sake, of course. Silver spoon and all. He might have even been that snobby, sneering transfer student who hailed from Gotham City and broken out the check book for every minute transaction.

Of course, this was all ridiculous speculation—Robin would never have been like that. Not in this universe, the next, whichever. Robin was not a pretty boy, rich boy.

Instead, he was something much worse.

He was a leader. And as _my_ leader responsible for _my_ actions, he was understandably pissed. With me. A hard thing to do, I'm sure. When I first met the guy, he was this insufferable do-gooder—the stuff of comic books, you know? At least he hadn't that gungho superhero mentality and his personality had been lacking...well, I guess he's still that same guy, only not. You'd have thought the ones to have flown the coop would have burst into reckless, post-parental guidance behavior.

But not Robin. That would have been the most outrageous thing he could have done. Instead of tripping over his not-so dainty feet towards that glorious and bright freedom, he turned right around and formed a team.

I did not have a falling out with my mentor. That man—he's the _last _person I'd go out of my way to insult. You know how it is, though: The kiddy deal with the serving of spandex yellow and red dished out on the side? Wouldn't anyone get sick of it? Getting fed the same thing day in and day out...what was a sidekick but a tag-a-long, wannabe hero playing with the big boys? Lectures this and that, but he didn't need words to make me feel ashamed. Whenever he caught me in my experimentation with my own powers. Whenever I abused them for petty, petty things.

I was a kid. Okay? _I was a kid_. So somehow I grew up into this disillusioned teenager and now I somehow never manage to find the time to drop in on my hometown of Central. Amazing feat, isn't it? Me, the fastest boy alive, never exploring his roots for those good days gone by sort of nostalgic _deal_. It wasn't like I was avoiding them or anything—the people there, the people I knew. The family I lived with once under one roof. And the disappointed mentor? Right around the corner...

But, hey, what can I say? I got sucked into Robin's fervor with only the vague purpose of protecting mankind to look forward to in my future. Surely that could have been my feeble retort, my justification, for never coming back home. I was sick of that place, right? I'd run away—not really. More like...like I was _chased_ out.

Of course not. I had that shiny, polished badge proclaiming my superhero status, all nice and golden and _pinned to my chest_—didn't I? Ignominy wasn't my thing, so why would I even think about it in the first place? Besides, it wasn't like the situation was that extreme. _Nobody_ knew a thing except me and—

So I used them for petty things, my power. _Unnecessary_ things. It didn't mean I was a murderer.

Ah. The crux of the matter, wasn't it? Gee, why did I turn out so jaded and twisted? I know that guy's death wasn't my fault. I wasn't so stupid as to automatically think the world ended twice fold just 'cause of an accidental death—by _me—_but did he have to rub it in, _that man_?

The man who'd been afflicted with me as his partner apparently was more concerned about the whack-job nature I'd turned my powers into more than some random dude's death. Or maybe it was the latter. In those last days of my ill-fated, not-so illustrious affair with the sidekick gig, I wasn't able to read him much at all.

Maybe I'd been inspired. He was a great guy, great superhero. He kicked ass daily and I knew ever since the first day of my job that _that'd_ be who I'd become. The hero. The Flash. With all the public fawning and admiration included—and niffty powers, to boot.

I was such an idiot. The whole damn country turned a blind eye to our freakish abilities. For christ's sake, there were even insurance companies out there just to cover up for our sloppy deeds. The civilians were the ones to clean up our messes. They were the ones to suffer. They were the ones who were always caught up in the middle of everything.

Not to say they were entirely guilt-free. The whole world would be a better place if there was no one around, I'd imagine, but was it my job to imagine? To think beyond the suffocating boundaries that being a superhero called for? We were in the limelight—that superficial glory. Yes, we saved lives. Yes, we stopped all the evil henchmen that were apt to run about like headless chickens—_y__es_, I bet we even saved goddamn cats stuck in those dumb trees. It was called the superhero training wheels, kiddies.

But what about the criminals? Don't lecture me—don't you dare. I have never advocated crime and I never will.

But the world isn't cast in black and white shades, though. There are grays. And shoved in between those gray is the necessity for survival, that primal drive to succeed. That evolution thing Darwin kept ranting about back in the day—the fittest will survive.

Society isn't so bendable, flexible, or even radical enough to accept those grays. Criminals were to be condemned. The end. There was no denouement, no...happy epilogue waiting for men on death row. If you broke the law, off to prison we go.

I thought just like that. That all bad men were bad men from the core and from the start. That they should be punished, condemned—it was the mentality I strove for because, otherwise, how could I have survived? To actively hunt men...men who I could've been.

Perhaps I'd been so interested in _Robin_ originally because he'd been tutored by the world's best. Gotham's infamous Dark Knight wasn't so dark; rather, he saw the world as it really was. The only question that particular man had to answer to then was...how to respond.

My mentor did no such thing. When it was revealed the impetus for all the tireless work I put into mastering my own abilities, all those months of experimentation, my mentor didn't pat me on the back and congratulated me. No, he sat me down and fairly _yelled_ at me. And he wasn't the type to yell, either. He was shrewd, didn't say stupid or meaningless things, and raised me fairly well under the circumstances.

Maybe it bothered him that I tried to break the law myself by breaking out an inmate. The inmate, the one who was apparently destined to die because of my decision to break taboo, had a family. He didn't deserve to die on the government's beck and call. He didn't deserve to be imprisoned for doing something so innately _good_ as to save his wife and kids. Not the only civilian who knew what I was but didn't treat me any differently for it. Not the guy I'd been friends with for weeks upon weeks.

His methods were a little wrong, so they threw him into jail? Where was justice to be had? I was a kid then, but I wasn't stupid and I wasn't a metahuman of the last generation—too set in the old, honorable, chivalry-crap, _comic book worthy_ days.

No, I was a kid who lived in a world constantly slapped with warfare and steeped in all things bad. A kid in _that kind of world_ trying to be some do-gooder? There was only so much naivety my inner-doubt and skepticism could take.

So I tried to be brave in my own little way, and my own little way just happened to end up killing the guy I'd been trying to save. Vibrating through walls hadn't been a problem once I figured out how to do it. The only matter was how to bring something else through with me.

More specifically, a person.

I killed a man at age eleven. With all the bravado and ego and arrogance of a child hero, I thought I could do good. Save a life, a friend. Selfishly think that I had such power...

I'd been frustrated with my mentor. The details are a little foggy now—it's been _years—_but I do remember the kid gloves I was handled with. As if I couldn't take what life could throw at me. I wasn't going to break down and cry just 'cause of a little injustice in the world. I was _Kid Flash_, I was my mentor's _sidekick_.

I could handle it, I thought. Maybe I wanted to do something stupid like proving myself. To the world? To that man.

That man didn't teach me all he knew. Like he knew that I wouldn't know how to accept the responsibility that came with our powers. He was right. My experiments probably screwed me over, but at age eleven every kid thinks he's invincible.

I learned how to walk through walls. I figured out how to separate my _molecules_ all own my own, with no mentor in the backseat and no instructions given previous. At the time, it was the most surreal experience of my life.

When I distanced myself from the Flash, I met a man of a decent sort. He didn't judge me. He accepted me for who I was. He listened to me, gave me advice, let me take up his time just by _talking_ to him.

He lived in the poorer parts of Central. You know, the run down neighborhoods that left old geezers shaking their heads in all of their self-righteous snobbery? But I never saw the guy differently for it. He was intelligent, smart. He _knew_ things. About life. Jaded and weary, but he was nice. He never looked down on me.

Did you know his daughter wanted to grow up and get enough money so that they could all move away? Little Janice was a grade school kid, a little younger than me, but she was already taking care of her mom and dad. Her little brother—christ, he wanted to do some good in the world. A figure of authority, like a policeman. The kid should've been thinking of the lack of toys he had or...or something. So selfless! How could a kid his age be so thoughtful?

Their mom was sickly, but she was bright and cheerful. She always greeted me with a smile.

Her husband was a good man. _A good man_.

I talked to him, but I didn't know him. It was why I was thrown when he was jailed. For something I couldn't even understand. He was taken in by some shady guys—blackmailed, threatened, whatever. They didn't threaten _him_, they threatened his kids. They threatened his wife, to kill her. Alone, helpless—how could a vulnerable woman like her stand up to such bastards?

He acquiesced. They were affiliated with a mob. _He knew that_. But he still gave in because he couldn't stand to see his family hurt.

I was a kid. I was helpless. What could I do? He never told me anything. He never told me how _troubled_ he was or how much he was suffering, alone, with no one to confide in. He kept his family in the dark, never told _me_ anything, so I had to learn that he'd gotten wrapped up in such a situation through the news!

Humiliation. Anger. _Disbelief_. Why hadn't he told me anything?

Wasn't I the Flash's sidekick? Wasn't I Kid Flash? Couldn't I have helped him in any way? Wasn't I a hero? Wasn't I powerful?

I was sick of it. It used to be all a game. The Flash hadn't listened to me. The police discredited anything I had to say. _No one_ understood. No one even cared! All they could focus on was the scandalous nature of it all.

But I'm not just a metahuman. I'm human, too. I can't be upstanding and moral and good all the time. I'm not some American icon, something to put up on a pedestal, someone to look up to.

I was just a kid back then. I didn't confuse myself with obligations—I saw something wrong, so I tried to fix it. It backfired on me. Of course it had to. Nothing was easy, was it?

My parents were ashamed of me, of the publicity I'd garnered. Afraid that I would be linked to them! Those moral, upstanding citizens! But they'd long cast me out and hoisted me off onto my aunt.

My uncle revealed his true self to me when I started abusing my powers.

The damnedest thing, yeah? What a coincidence—the Flash, my relative! Have we got some freak genes or something? Apparently, the superhero gig was in my blood from the getgo...

That was all it was supposed to be. A gig. And then the man I killed was stuck in a wall. Did you know that something can't be made to occupy a space already filled with mass? The bricks seeped red that day...

Disillusioned, I fled the public scene. I wallowed a bit in Central before I got so sick of it all. Or maybe I was in grief. I ran.

Robin hooked me up with Jump City and his crew. Gave a place to stay for the night and fed me stuff. Worn out from all the running I'd done, I'd crashed at the fellow junior superhero's house without any warning. Or wariness—I was so tired. Funny how strong our friendship grew after that. He'd been just a boy I had passing acquaintance with...

Funny how he could grow to know me so well.

He didn't even bat an eye at my story, although I left out the nitty gritty bloody bits about the inmate's death. He didn't condemn me for trying to save a man, though he clearly disapproved of my reckless behavior. He was also confused; he didn't understand _why_ I felt I had to save that man.

But it wasn't an obligation. It was for moral's sake. It was called being human.

Robin hadn't been able to see the grays. His world was too staunchly set full of whites and blacks. In a way, he didn't understand me—_or know me—_at all. He couldn't, not with that gungho superhero mentality.

But I moved beyond that. Is that an arrogant thing to say? But it was true. I wasn't going to be somebody's hero. I did my job, yeah, but I was detached. Nothing to hurt me, nothing to affect me—it was all part of a game.

Robin let me play. Robin let me play _precisely_ because he disapproved of my flippant attitude. He knew someday, somehow, an event would jarr me from my apathy and make me see.

I lived.

The citizens of Jump had no idea who they owed their sorry asses to in the subsequent weeks after my little death stint.

I lived. Consequently, Robin would delight in reeling me into his world of leadership abusing and painful, terse sessions of lecturing.

That was what I believed.

But Robin didn't rail at me in the aftermath. He didn't yell at me or even act like that cold steel persona of Ideal Leader.

He wasn't Robin in that moment. He was Dick Grayson. And that meant more to me than anything.

Honesty. Trust. The brilliant and flashy world of superheroes had little of these. Trusting a teammate was an obligation, a decision in order to make a well oiled machine out of a team. Honesty? What honesty? Everybody had duel identities...

I'm so sick of being Kid Flash.

With Robin it was different. With him I could take off all masks. I never felt mad when he couldn't return the favor. I knew that he had this inability to _take off_ the mask, cast aside the persona, peel back deceptive skin in order to reveal the true face...

Robin was his true face. That was why he could never be fully honest. With me or anyone else, he couldn't detach himself from his other life. He couldn't escape the mechanics of duality. I never begrudged him for it—it was a result of his hard line upbringing, training. I accepted it as a part of him. I understood that it was a core part of his character. I understood that this was his flaw.

In the beginning, I didn't understand. But in the beginning, I was disillusioned and mistrusting of the whole superhero thing. In spite of that, a friendship grew. Steadily, carefully, slowly...strongly.

And I was finally rewarded. For the first time, he was Dick Grayson in my presence.

It made all the difference to me.

Robin was finally beginning to trust me. It only made sense to do the same for him.

He knew there was anger inside of me. He knew that with all my jaded, distrusting outlook on the world that I could never be the vigilante he would be. I could never be him, not a team leader. Not a guy with all these grand responsibilities.

What he didn't know was why I would choose working in the slums over working in the Tower any day. He didn't know how weary I was of this life or that I wanted, desperately, for everyone and everything to just _shut up _and leave me be.

I think, sometimes, I'm a hypocrite. I want to let loose and rail on the world for screwing me over, but I don't have the fucking energy. Yet at the same time the weakening of my powers blows my mind—I can't accept it. Maybe metahumans are like that, freaks who can't live without being biologically freaky. Maybe it's against our gene _natures_ to lose our powers. Who knows.

I don't really care what happens to me now. I want to die, I want to live. I want my powers, I don't want them back—because that would mean that I'd still be a metahuman. I'm just so full of contradictions it makes my head hurt just to think of them all.

I don't know what I want. Somehow, I should _care_ about the rut I'm stuck in, the inevitable fall towards listlessness, apathy, and all that good stuff, but I don't care. I really don't. But now I do. Now I want to _live_. I want her to see me! Only me.

Not some stupid dream figment in her head, in her past, that's never going to come back. I hate her, I love her. I want her to stop having this power over me, this innate tether bond that ties the two of us together. Not like she cares, knows, or _wants_ it. Not like me.

Rachel doesn't like me that way.

It hurts. It hurts, damn it—_it hurts_.

I'm recuperating in the T-Tower. I hate it here. Cyborg goes all out to impress, apparently, he and his stupid technology. Sterile, cold, I can't stand hospitals much less a fake ward playing at medic.

His little robots tend to me here. Almost like they're sentient. They watch me with freaky red eyes.

Ultimately, Cyborg and his little pets are all hooked up to the tower mainframe. However, it does not bring me any sort of comfort to be stitched and sewn and assembled back together by mechanical things that can't even call my name.

Everyone else is too damn busy tracking down the Brotherhood of Evil Gits to even drop by my prison and say hello.

Is it so wrong just to want to hear my name? I'm a person. Metahuman, yes, but I'm _alive_. Not well—maybe. I need some conversation or I'll go crazy. Four days I've been in here. Once I got my wits about and realized that Starfire took me to a freakin' French _hospital_, I ran out of there like it was nobody's business. And it wasn't! I wasn't going to die, and I'm quite alive now, aren't I?

Robin didn't let me sulk off to the slums to lick my wounds in the goddamn dinky walled privacy of my pad. I could have seen Rachel. I could have done a lot of things.

Now I'm here. In a place where I don't belong and don't want to belong. In a place that represents all the goodness, teeth-rotting sugar cane, cotton candy _crap_ in the world about teenage vigilantes. God, I don't want to be in this wreck of a fun house.

Meanwhile, robots creep me out. Cyborg doesn't have the freaking _confidence_ to do some healing aid on me all by lonesome himself. A technician, not a healer, not a medic. I suppose being a seven-foot-tall metal tower himself taught him not to mess with tinkling and delicate things—like surgery. Like healing. Aw, who cares anyway! His own damn fault for not watching my back when the Brotherhood first got a hit on me.

I know he's beating himself over and over and over because of that. Guilt is making him stay far from my vicinity. It pisses me off, it does. I don't blame him, either—evil dudes and dudette being a pain in the ass and all—but I hate his avoidance. Can't we just sit down and talk like reasonable adults? But of course, we're not adults; we're _kids_. Playing at superheroes. In a superhero world.

Is it any wonder I'd felt my life was a game before I got slammed into the ground by the now-not-wussy-Brotherhood of Evil?

I want him to call off his robots. Right now. I want these people to get over themselves and come and at least pretend to give a damn about me. Hypocrite, aren't I? I don't like them. I don't _want_ them to like me. But I still want to see their faces. A lot. Right now.

Humans aren't meant to be caged like animals. Metahumans are not animals, either. We're not showthings. We're not circus freaks. I'm getting claustrophobic in here just because I'm not used to metal walls.

Back home—not Central, never that—there weren't any metal walls. The slums, my home? No. But nearby is where I really live. And where I really live is where Rachel really lives. You get the picture?

She used to cry in her sleep, all pathetic and mewling like. That was before I thought to get to know her and thought she was a really creepy lady who never came out of her room. I thought she was old, too, being some years older than I.

It doesn't matter anymore.

My point is: do you know how thin those apartment walls really are? Seriously. I could _hear_ her.

She doesn't cry anymore—my girl Rachel is made of tougher stuff. Or maybe she's getting over Dream Boy. Not likely. Why? Because she's still lovesick, horny, and mooning for a prepubescent boy who's probably forgotten all about her. It's been, what, over ten years?

God, I hate him.

Sometimes I hate her, too.

I slap myself at that point, but my heart's not only mutinous. It's masochistic. It loves to throw me for a loop when it wrenches my feelings this way and that. It loves to see me be tortured. It loves my suffering, beating wildly and manically when the damn girl's around, and then _hurting, hurting, hurting_ when she's not.

It loves flopping all over, flipping crazily between love and hate, because I'm a sick _masochist_ and I don't even care.

I should move. Where? Don't care—but far. Far, far away from here. Damn my obligations, and damn my teammates!

But I can't abandon Richard; he's not an obligation. He sure as hell isn't a teammate, either. He's something else, more.

A friend.

Damn you, heart. Damn you to hell.

* * *

Not...a happy chapter. Next chapter will revert back to Raven's very muted tone. I'm sensing a POV pattern here.

Jinx should pop up in future somewhere. Considering that the episode Lightspeed should happen quite soon, it's a possibility.

The chapter's not edited, but I'll get to it. Took a break from Teen Titans and during that time I practiced using present tense. I've given up making this fic nice and neat, but I still like it since it's all one big experiment. The jarring differences between Raven's and Wally's POV is pretty cool.


	5. Happy Day

Timeline:

Rachel moved out when she was 18. She moved into Wally's apartment complex.

Consequently, he befriended her about a year later.

She was 20 the last time we saw her POV.

Researching family legalities in California was interesting but depressing.

* * *

Undecided. I was undecided.

I was going to turn twenty-one years old this year, and I currently had no goal in life. Absolutely none. I had no idea what I want to be. I didn't even know what to do with my life, and the thought wasn't as depressing as it should have been. Rather, I was feeling fairly numb. Blank. Whenever I tried to concentrate on dealing with the question of my own _future_, I just...disappear. My thoughts, I mean. I just drift. I don't want to think of this, any of this. I want to forget, but procrastination plays hell on the soul...

Thinking about what would become of the rest of my life was terrifying. So terrifying I shut down as if a switch was thrown. It wasn't a suffocating sense of fear, not the kind that would choke you until you felt you were unable to even breathe. It was a subtle terror, the kind that slipped behind your defenses and was suddenly _there_.

Surviving my father on a day-to-day basis during high school didn't really allow me many options. All my energy was spent on tip-toeing around him, not on seriously sitting down to think of what I wanted to be as an adult.

My god, I was an adult. In the eyes of the law, I was finally able to drink alcohol, the substance that had littered my pre-adolescence.

The thought was a frightening one. My father had not been...prone to excessive drinking, not in the last few years when we were still living together. We had tea for that, after all, which was a godsend in itself. Perhaps I'd drugged him enough on that soothing balm to lessen his desire for hard drinks and their ilk. Probably not.

But it'd been different during my junior high years. It was roughly around the time where I was failing in my schoolwork and my apparent interest in literature and writing had plummeted, sending my previously hopeful teachers into frenzies.

I'd showed promise, but it was not a period of my life where I was particularly concerned with my education.

It was different now, though. It'd been incredibly difficult for me for the first several months as an independent person. Neglectful or not, my father still had provided for me. I hadn't realized how grateful I should have been simply to be assured of a place in his house, no matter how grudgingly he did so.

Eighteen-years-old and I could finally move out. I thought it would have been the end of all my troubles, of those intense years where I had to watch out for my back in my own home. I was wrong. I'd been naïve, drunk off of that glorious possibility of living alone and being independent for the first time in my life, of keeping my wages for myself and have absolutely no obligations to anybody.

I was such a fool.

When I was seventeen, I wanted emancipation, but the way my father looked at me for _months_ after I'd tried to negotiate with him...

He loathe to have me escape his grasp. The thought that he could keep me within his home forever terrified me beyond words. Of course my fear was an unfounded one—I moved out a year later. But he still had power over me. If he wanted to, he could drag me back home and force me to live with him again. I was acutely aware of this fact, even as I tentatively enrolled into a nearby college and had begun to work.

Real work. The kind that actually paid the bills. I was known as that weird part timer at the local grocers, the skulking librarian at the front desk, and the regular slash server at the corner cafe. All were demanding jobs, the first being just degrading, but they paid well enough. I survived.

And yet...

I'm kind of tired.

"You want to be a writer, right?" A pile of papers were slapped onto my desk, a couple slipping off to the floor.

I stared, mouth slack. I didn't turn. There was no need.

West's impatient fidgeting wasn't something you could easily ignore, but I usually managed. But his agitation was near audible—were his clothes _flapping_ again? Those baggy sleeves of his, for one, were kicking up dust motes into the air. I wrinkled my nose.

"Please," I said. "Please don't let this be another ill attempt at getting me to cheat for you."

I turned, and then was nearly blinded by his grin. Damn that grin, so smug, so _knowing_. "Nah. I wouldn't do that to ya, Rach. What would the principle say? I'd have to drag you over there for my perfect work."

"Mine, you mean," I corrected.

"Sometimes," he said, stubbornly. Then he backpedaled. "Okay, okay, that _one_ time. You're not letting it go, are you?"

"I wasn't about to set a precedent for doing your work for you. If you hadn't turned in that essay..."

"Which I'm very grateful for," he broke in.

"Well, you wouldn't be graduating now, would you?"

"Thanks, Rach." His grin toned down into something more sincere.

"So," I sighed, pushing away from the desk. He jumped back before his feet could be crushed by the wheels, "...What is it this time? What do you need help on?"

"Er, that's the thing. It's not exactly—uh, work. Notes. To my teachers. It's notes." He clasped his fidgeting hands and held the gesture up to me. "Pretty please help me?"

I stared at him. "...No."

"Please, please?"

What he wanted me to do was to compose a ridiculously grown up sounding letter for him. Letters, not letter. Because he had multiple teachers all clamoring for the same thing _every_ week he ups and ditches class—class_es_. But this? Obviously, West wasn't planning on playing hooky for just five days of the week. Was he audacious enough to leave for an early winter break?

I sighed. I couldn't help it, I reached up and rubbed my temples. Meanwhile, his feet alternatively bounced off the floor in his impatience as he waited for my answer.

"Fine," I said. "Leave them here, your pathetic excuse for parental notes." What a joke. Everyone knew West didn't live with his parents. None of them, actually, knew that he lived alone...what contact information did he give the school, then, I wonder?

That gave me pause. He wasn't legal, and he was living alone?

As far as I knew, West was fine if a bit distant from his family. They lived all the way in Central, didn't they?

The question wouldn't leave me alone. It bothered me, immensely—why did Wally West live here alone? In downtown Jump City, a major port on this side of the coast? The kid was smart, though he'd love to contradict otherwise, but he was _smart_ and he hung around an industrial town out by the sea? A place people couldn't care two bits about but the circus that had metahumans running around?

Why did this bother me now of all times? Why hadn't I realized this before?

There was something...strange, abnormal, going on with my neighbor.

Lost in thought as I was, I didn't notice when he snapped a finger in my face. _In_ my face.

Expression twisting, I glared at his rudeness. I turned in my seat. "Is there anything else you need to mooch off of me before you go off on your merry way? Anything at all like, say, watering some godforsaken plant?"

My abrupt vehemence surprised me, but he looked unfazed. "Yeah, actually," he said. "I just have a...favor."

This had to be good.

"Don't be surprised," he said, with a pause, "if it takes me awhile to get back this time."

"Isn't that what you said around your spring break?" My brows raised, skeptic.

"Yeah," West said slowly, seemingly glaring at the carpet floor. "But you know that other thing you guessed at?"

I racked my mind, imaging I was pulling out a drawer out of a file cabinet labeled especially for him. Now my brows furrowed. "Dropping out. Right. Well, since you still came back afterwards, I figured..."

"You figured wrong," he said, shaking his head. He muttered something, something inaudible, before he looked up. I was taken aback at how his eyes fairly glowed. "I'm definitely not coming back this time."

My throat seized with an inexplicable _something_. "What?" I choked, before coughing. "I mean...I mean, what are you talking about? You're coming back to Jump, aren't you?"

He blinked. The sudden movement didn't disrupt the intensity of the moment. Rather, his apparent obliviousness raised this acute tightness in my throat. My body stilled, and I tried to ignore how my nails dug into pliant flesh as I curled my hands, tight. I was shaking, I realized. Why was I shaking? Why wasn't he saying anything?

"It's not like I'm never coming back to Jump," he said. I caught his eyes but was barely able to comprehend the _look_ in them. "I'm, um..going someplace far."

"...Someplace far?"

He coughed. "Yeah. Paris."

I was thrown. In my terrible, abrupt _relief_ I burst into laughter—the hysterically relieved kind. "That's it? That's all that you're doing? A school trip, is it?"

Was that panic in his gaze? I tried to hold it, but he immediately wrenched his eyes away. Frustration crept into my voice. "What? What is it?" Something squeezed my chest tight—

"No," he said, too quick. "No, no, you're right. It's sponsored by the school. I'm going with some—friends."

"Friends," I said.

He nodded.

He was lying. He had to be. Why else would he act so...anyway, who were these friends? Irate, I tried putting a face to a name—any name that West could have mentioned to me—when I stopped short. West didn't have any friends. Nobody he hung out with. The time he could have spent hanging out with people was spent with _me_.

Who were his friends?

The same people who kept inviting him to all these strange trips over the last year...

niggled in the back of my head. "Why...Paris? Just out of curiosity."

"Eiffel Tower?" he said lamely. "I take French, if you remember."

"Which you hate."

"Which I hate," he agreed. "But, hey, what's the harm in a little culture? Or a bit of sun, even, yeah?"

Something was off. As we kept talking, I noticed how more and more glum he seemed. He still smiled like Wally West. He still talked like Wally West, still _acted_ like Wally West, but he was avoiding my eyes. Clear, baby blue eyes that were usually so transparent to me, why hide them now?

Maybe I was paranoid, jumping the gun. I'd long acknowledged that I had a tendency for distrust and suspicion.

Why am I fixated on his eyes, anyway? It wasn't as if he committed a crime or something. Stupid, really, being all panicky just because he won't meet my gaze...straight. Right.

"Okay. Okay," I breathed. "You're going to Paris. Fine. Do you know how long? Forget it, just shoot me an email."

His surreptitious glance towards the room's computer betrayed his doubt. "On _that_ thing?" he said.

"Yes, _that thing_," I mocked. "I'm not going to be waiting for air mail among all the crap and ads I get everyday. So, yes, an email."

"Annoying. And troublesome! Can't I just drop by to surprise you?"

"Do what you will!" I was exasperated. This tetchy feeling wouldn't leave me alone. It kept urging and urging me to look beneath the beneath when there was none to be had! West wasn't hiding anything from me. He couldn't be.

_Stop squeezing, chest, stop squeezing—_

Not with something so big that his every word was ringing with finality.

"Look. Look, West, be safe, okay? Come back whenever. I'll still be here, taking care of your damn plant. Just get back eventually, all right? I don't want to have to deal with another annoying visit from our landlady, so make sure you drop by her office. You know, to explain so...so..."

I was babbling. My god, I was really babbling. Somebody make me stop.

"Rachel?" He seemed hesitant.

Relief. I welcomed the interruption. "What? Anything I missed?"

"No," he said. His mouth thinned, twisted. "No. Nothing at all."

Unease slithered in, and I felt uncertain. There was this tangible _thing_ coming in between us, settling upon his shoulders, that I couldn't quite..."Anyways, it's your birthday soon, isn't it? Maybe I'll get you something?"

It ended as a question, reflecting my doubt.

"Yeah," he said, the beginnings of a smile showing, a hint of something more. "Yeah, it is. Maybe you will. I'll be there to get it."

Shuttered eyes which the smile did not touch. He was _lying_.

The next time I saw Wally West, he was seeping the blood that was getting on my floor. But I digress, I'm getting ahead of myself.

xx

Some time ago, West discovered where my meager savings had come from.

He leapt forward. "Rachel—you _work_ here? You're a waitress!" He laughed, bounding across the floor. "You! A waitress! Since when? When?"

My face had every bit of the disdain I was not saying, I assure you.

Of course what else was unspoken was my utmost horror. My smile was fixedly frozen and decidedly _not_ the same shade of bubblegum cheery as I should have been making it out to be—damn workplace rule.

In the peripheral view of my little twitching eye, I saw my manager look warningly in my direction. I know, I know, it's the second _time_, sir. Yes, I will force the man off the premises...yes, he is of no relation to me..._please_ don't lay me off for this...

"Idiot," I hiss, spitfire in my tone, the moment my manager stalked out back. "What are you doing? _Again_? Get away!"

"Aw, Rach, you _shouldn't_ have," was his loud exclamation instead. With enthused, paper thin giddiness, he took my hands and boldly shook them in view of _all_ patrons. Then he'd swiftly tucked a bill in the _folds of my dress_ and bounced away for the nearest table.

The patrons nearby reared back; one of them shot me a _look_ that said this was all _my_ fault that this disgusting creature now inhabited the room.

Meanwhile, a fifty fluttered to the floor, its green a sharp contrast to my uniform. Beneath my cringing, gritted smile, I was grinding a man's face quite unpatriotically underneath my boot's heel.

Damn it, West.

Just as I turned to walk—_stomp—_away, he stopped me with a call of, "Oh, _Rachel_! Don't tell me this is how you treat _all_ your customers!" What a jaunty tone.

A murmuring broke out. Pivoting with a fixed smile, I fluttered over to his side. "Oh, _of course_, sir," I said brightly with demure steel and all the politeness I could muster. "I am _so_ sorry."

That boy...grinning at me so inanely. I wanted to smack him. I resisted the urge—quite nobly, might I add.

"What—do—you—_want_?"

"Why, your company, m'am," he chirped back, _still grinning_.

My smile abruptly dropped. Holding a hand to a throbbing temple, I muttered, "Come with me. _Now_."

I dragged that grinning countenance away, and I knew I'd just cost my job. Again.

Once we were outside, he ducked my grasp and tripped away. He laughed aloud, running this way and that like a kid. I stopped him short with crossed arms and a glare. He pivoted towards him, wholly unapologetic.

"Yes, I got you fired," he said simply.

"but why?" I struggled to tamp down on my anger. "Why do you keep doing this? Is this going to happen in the _future_, too? Where will you draw the line between adult matters and your childish games, West?"

His grin twisted something dark. "Those places...they're so beneath you."

"That," I said, glaring, "is my decision to make. It's for _me_ to decide."

That easy expression, that too casual manner when getting people _fired_, finally faltered. He blurted out, "You want to work at this snobby place? With its crap wage and its crap people?"

I released a sigh, anger deflating. Exasperation colored my tone. "We've been over this before. You don't understand. I don't _have_ a _choice_. This is life. It's not your decision to make. Let it go."

"Why are you so humble?" West's voice was glum.

"Don't be stupid," I breathed. "Do you think I want to juggle between four jobs? And do you think I don't know what you're doing either? Getting me fired...giving me cash...I have my own pride, West. And you are grating on _mine_."

"That cash is to pay you back," he snapped. "Do you think it's fair to expect me to stand back and watch you struggle? When should I act? What, should I wait until you're lying in a heap on some hospital bed?!"

"It's my decision to make!" Chest heaving, I spat, "I'm exhausted, I'll admit it. I'm falling apart, I _know_...but you—why are you going so far?! Have I asked you to look out for me? Have you even _wondered_ if I wanted your help?"

"Rachel—!"

"I have my _pride_, damn it," I said, grasping my shuddered eyes. "I'm supposed to be the _adult_ here. I'm supposed to be steady, not about to collapse! But why don't I have it together?"

I couldn't see him or anything else. Griping my face with my two hands and catching the premature scream in my throat took all the exertion I had left in me. Me, a grown woman, in the streets with a ridiculous dress on and a ridiculous lack of composure to boot. I was _ashamed_ of myself.

But that was why I never noticed when he came close, pulled my hands free, and forced me into his arms. "What—"

"Just shut up," he said. "Shut up and enjoy the _moment_."

His voice was tight and I stood there in dumb astonishment. Sense came upon me, flecking my words with irritation. "Wally, let go of me right now. What do you think you're doing?"

But he just tightened his embrace! What is wrong with this boy? I neither reciprocated or encouraged this awkward hug. We were in _public_ for Christ's sake, and I was being too intimately pressed up against a minor.

"_Wally_—"

I hate it. I admit it, I hate what I'm doing, okay? I hate that I can't thinking up ways to help you. I _hate_ that I'm being so pigheadedly stubborn even when I know you don't like it or _need_ it. I hate that I can't stop myself!"

Hesitantly, I laid a palm against his back; I still couldn't see his face. What _was_ he thinking, that boy? "Wally, it's not that I don't appreciate what you're doing for...me. But, Wally, why—?"

He suddenly jerked away. West averted his eyes from me and my hand suddenly clenched in the empty cold, the air—such _loss_. Arms fell at my side and the cool night brushed bare shoulders. I shivered; West had been surprisingly warm. "I mean," I added, "we're...friends, aren't we?"

"Friends?" he echoed. He turned towards me and I finally got a look at his face. His expression was odd, distracted. "Are we?"

I was taken aback. "Of course we are. What's on your mind, kid?"

His eyes were still dim, but his grin was perversely bright. "Nah—nothing's on my mind, Rach. But, hey, say you'll accept this cash? Pretty please?"

He sounded—odd. Strangled.

I burst out, "Oh for god's sake, what is the _matter _with you—"

"Here!" he blurted, pressing something into my hands. I accepted blindly, without thinking—"Take it! Feed yourself with it. Do something. Gosh, I don't know. Just don't throw it away, yeah?"

His abrupt laughter was paper thin, dry. "Don't toss it down on the ground again, yeah?" And those falsely lit eyes were so hallow. "Who knows who might step on it? Well, uh...seeya...seeya, Rach!" He laughed again, a bit hysterically, and ran for it.

I stared after him blankly, blinking, still utterly thrown and at a loss. What was that all about? I glanced down, and I froze. I trembled.

It was the very same bill I'd let fall onto the cafe floor, grounded beneath my feet. The grainy soot of my boot's underheel had translated itself onto the paper.

...When had Wally have time to go back for the fifty dollar bill?

I never saw him go back.

xx

What should have passed quickly and quietly and unnoticed just like any other day, slipping into a smeared deluge of inconsequential summer weeks, did not.

And in all honesty, I hadn't expected any differently. The same dull day...that I just wanted to be _over_. My twenty-first birthday should've been just another tedious bore.

I wonder if this cynicism about my own birth meant that I hate myself. I don't think so—the latter seems off. I don't hate myself. If I did, I wouldn't have lasted this long.

Which begs to question: What am I living for?

Of course my father in all his finite glory thinks I live to serve his ego; the wife was long dead, but what of the daughter? ?I'd been my father's personal servant for too long. And for those years while I _deeply_ and _wretchedly_ knew that an injustice was being done to me, I was helpless to change it.

My mother, so wonderful, used what meager funds she was allowed to keep for herself to sneak me little gifts throughout my childhood. As a little girl, I lived vicariously for those days, quiet moments of contentment with no one else but my mother and I.

But my birthdays were especially dear to her. She never forgot, never ignored, and I suppose i twas then that I knew what it was liked to be adored, to be celebrated for my _birth_, my existence.

"You are not an accident," she'd whisper in my ear, every year, while tucking some of my errant strands away. But they'd always fall back in my face, in front of my blissfully happy face, and I'd peek through with wide, shining eyes.

But it doesn't matter anymore; she's dead now.

I am not an accident. In my child's mind, I didn't even know what an accident _was_ and how could I stop being one, please? My mother—that gentle woman—made it an insistent habit to _remind_ me of this. She never told me she loved me, I'd just _assumed_. But as I grew older, I started to wonder...

I am not an accident, to be sure. Because I had a purpose—I just don't know _what_.

Live, breed, _die_. Probably.

In the second grade, my father came for me. While my mother suffered the stigma of the whore that ran away, the single mother but separated wife, my father swept in and carried me off. She wouldn't stand for it, the apparent and forceful abduction of her child.

They even went to court. _Me_, they fought over _me_.

"This child is special," was the gleeful and near salacious voice of my father as he murmured beside my ear. Heavy hands rested upon my shoulders and back—and even at that age I knew those hands were to be feared. The hands that kept me locked away, in his custody, when all I wanted was Mama.

And my mother—came with.

We were a package deal and the court, that judge, ruled in my _father's_ favor.

He didn't even attend her funeral, the bastard. He wouldn't have even _paid_ for the damn expenses if it not been his preening obsession with appearances.

Looking back, I wonder if the pretense had been worth it. Because in the end my father went _nowhere_, lived off of his own daughter, and had no hope of rising from that dead beat job, that crap life he lived—

And I? I felt _vindicated_ and _good_.

xx

Knowing all of this, knowing that I was the only person alive who remembered my own birthday, it was a shock to be sure when I walked into my apartment room and was attacked by _confetti._ In the face.

I'd walked from the vague nightmare of of real life into the bigger nightmare of this surreal, twisted landscape that my former apartment had suddenly become. So much for home, sweet home. There was decoration put out, for Christ's sake.

Stone-faced, I stepped over the threshold, dumped my purse, and then sharply pivoted to go _hunting_.

It took only four steps to reach the door right over, which was conspicuously locked. West _never_ locked his own damn door.

I bore a stoic gaze into the whorls and pits of the wood, then turned my attentions to the little peephole, _daring_ the wretched person behind it to take one step outside—just _one_ step...

A pause. I heard a chain being put up. I exploded.

"Open up _right now_, Wally West, and explain to me just what the hell did you do to my room?!Don't you _dare_ walk away! _Open this damn door—"_

I lunged for that wobbling brass knob when the door jerked free—denied.

"_Unhook this chain_."

"Ehehe...good morning, Rachel dear...?"

"There are balloons and confetti and pink _things_ in my apartment, on the walls—what is all this, West? What _possessed_ you to think this was a good idea? What compelled you to this new height of idiocy?"

"Well, the door was open, so I let myself in—"

"I certainly did not forget to lock my own front door."

"And, well...I kinda happened to be carrying...happy stuff with me?"

My brow twitched. "Happy...things?" I'm glad my voice was so mild, I could've been talking about the weather for all I cared.

"Yeah, yeah! _Happy_ things, Rach—think _happy_!" that previous quavering voice certainly had turned _cheery_.

But I was not warming up to the topic. At all.

"Get it down, get it _all_ down."

"Er, no?"

Another twitch. "What?"

"Kinda used—happy glue?"

My tone turned utterly flat. "_Happy_ glue."

He didn't. He couldn't have _really_...

"Yup!" the coward chirped, still safe behind his _chained door_. "I used _Haaaapy Glue_!"

"...West?"

"Yeah?"

Though he couldn't see, I made sure my smile was sweet. "Unlock this door, please? Pretty, pretty please? _Now_."

That self-preserving bastard, he never did unlock that door.

Somewhat awed but mostly irked at his sudden reticence and unusual silence, I slumped back home—all four steps away.

And found blaring _pink_ in my eyes.

I resigned myself for a long night of cleaning. He'd even replaced the blanket and sheets of my bed for this hideous, giant _doily—_

A cake. On my table. A _cake_.

Its scrolling script of _Happy Adulthood, Happy Day, Happy Birthday!_ was just too inane, too bubblegum pink, a happy shrill curled in pink mousse embossed lettering. I miserably sat down.

Just what was that boy playing at? Her certainly couldn't have known it was my birthday from _me_. Like hell I would've told him that bit of info.

Oh, well. Happy birthday, yay me...I guess.

Tilting my head back, I tossed out, "How'd you know it was today, West?"

Silence. Then—a hesitant thump on the other side of the wall was my only answer.

Too late. I caught sight of vivid streamers dripping off the ceiling. I scowled.

"You know," I said, voice forcibly casual now, "I know in some twisted way you're utterly convinced you're doing the right thing. We've had some days now to cool off, right? So why don't you explain to me what exactly you were thinking when you started to get me fired from my jobs."

It'd been the best wage I'd been getting so far. That restaurant was stuff as hell, sure, but the job _paid_. No matter how snooty the customers or how chauvinistic the boss, the job _paid_.

Until West had gone to clear means to get me booted. But this had been the first time I'd been _fired_ just for being responsible for the duress West's mere presence apparently caused.

Yeah. Right.

I should be angry about this. I should have _thrashed_ that door down—God knew only _how—_and throttled the kid until I got my answers. But I already knew, didn't I? He just wouldn't _admit_ as much.

Since when had my lackadaisical, hooky playing neighbor cared so much about _me_? It was irritating, and probably he'd misunderstood just how much liberty he could take in _my_ life.

I blew a stray strand aside; my hair was getting longer already and it made me more irate than it should've. I stood.

"Look, kid," I breathed, exasperated. "I could overlook today's...incident. But my work life? Leave it alone. I only take your money because you _owe_ me, but don't be stupid and give me anymore. You are _not_ going to stop me from being a perfectly functional adult in this society."

A stubborn silence.

"Okay, _fine_, stay speechless—" I stopped, narrowing my eyes. "If you snuck out without my knowing, I'd be talking to a wall right now and I don't appreciate being made a fool out of."

No answer. I threw up my hands.

I went to bed.

A week later West told me he was leaving for Paris.


End file.
